Week 29

After finally completing my high poly, I attended my workshop with Chris. Although I'd made a start on my low poly I hadn't gotten too far with it due to the fact that I wanted to get some tips for bringing my poly count down. As I knew I was going to be struggling to reach the number Chris was after due to the sheer fact that I had eighteen objects I wanted as many tips as I could get my hands on. One tip was to get rid of the insides of where the finger joints are due to the fact that you can't really see them and from a distance they won't have that much of an impact. Other things I could do was too remove the holes on the fingers due to the fact that they can baked on in the normal  maps and they won't look out of place, this would also help for when I go to unwrap the piece due to the fact that there will be less fiddly parts to have to work with.
       So I returned home and that was exactly what I did, I removed the holes drastically bringing the count down. This was a very monotonous task that had to be done but I was really rather happy to bring my overall scene down into the 9000 mark. This took a lot of reducing in geometry and meant that each item needed to be around 500 polys. Which took an awful lot to get too, I removed as much geometry as I could trying my best not get rid of any important parts that would affect the baking of the normal's at the end.
        After this I moved on to unwrapping each object which was interesting as, each object was relatively similar to the last and I wanted to unwrap each the same as the one before. Which meant I would unwrap the first one as best I could do the second one and realize a better and more efficient way of unwrapping the object then return to the first one and do it again. Which as you can imagine meant unwrapping the object took longer than first expected but at the end of the day meant the baking of the normal's should be good. After finally reaching the end of the unwrapping part of this task I attended a drop in session to get Chris to give my UV's the once over. After seeing the work he showed places to improve my UV's due to when I run the script that hardens and soften edges their may be some issues as a lot of the UV's need to be on separate islands. This is due to the fact that I want my object to be relatively hard to resemble the metal I want to imitate. I then returned home and began breaking the UV's and trying to create a more readable UV map layout. Below is the finished low poly after the script has been ran. So far I appear to be keeping to the adjusted time table I'd given myself.