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Retopologizing Game Characters in Maya

by Justin Marshall

Finishing your polished game character sculpt is not the end of your modeling pipeline. In this course, you will learn to use Maya to create game-ready character geometry from an existing high-resolution sculpt.

What you'll learn

Once you've designed your highly detailed, sculpted game character, there's still one more step that needs to be done - retopology. In this course, Retopologizing Game Characters in Maya, you'll take a sculpted mesh and use Maya to create a lower-resolution game-appropriate mesh that will look like your design. You'll start by learning the basics of getting a reference model created. Then, you'll use several polygon modeling tools to edit your base geometry to better reflect the shapes and silhouettes of your reference model. Finally, you'll use the Quad Draw tool in Maya to create a new topology for your character completely from scratch. By the end of this course, you'll have a much better idea about some of the options you have in Maya for creating a new, game-ready mesh from a detailed sculpt. Software required: Maya.

About the author

Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials, and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist. As an author, Justin enjoys collaborating with fellow authors, especially on project... more

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