Turtle Low Poly

    I think the low poly version of the turtle is about ready now. It currently has 5182 tris, which should be reasonable for its intended screen size. Aside from that, I also set up UVs and baked normals from the high poly version. This low poly version ended up being much easier to UV than the high poly version. The UV editor ran pretty slow when I was originally unwrapping the high poly, and it was also difficult to mark seams just because there were so many edges. 

   Next I'm going to start on textures and then project the skin weights to this new low poly version. I already tested it earlier, and it's pretty straight forward.

Turtle Animation Test

     I created a quick walk cycle to test out the rig.

 

 

    Overall the rig is fairly easy to animate with, so I'm going to move on to texturing next. I'm having a bit of trouble UVing this mesh due to its density. To make that easier, I'm going to try retopologizing so it has a lower polycount. I haven't used Maya's retopology tools too much before, but I'm finding them to be pretty intuitive and fun to use.

 

 

Starting to retopologize the shell.

        We'll see how this goes. Worst case scenario, I can set up the UVs in ZBrush instead. I'm hoping the retopolgy works out though. It should also help with performance since skeletal meshes can't use Nanite.