Once the sculpt was finished, I moved into Maya for retopology. I expected this process to be straightforward because I had done retopo before, but I ran into issues almost immediately. The biggest challenge was the clothing. My sculpted outfit had lots of pockets and small folds, which made clean retopology difficult. I struggled for a while, but after watching a few tutorials I finally understood how to simplify shapes and maintain the silhouette without losing detail.
After completing the retopology, I moved on to UV mapping. Before starting, I planned out how many UV sets I would need:
- One UV set for the entire body
- Separate UVs for clothes
- Separate UVs for hair
- A separate UV just for the eyes (because I wanted detailed close-ups)
Retopology & UV unwrapping
Once all the UVs were done, I began the baking process. At first, I tried baking everything inside Substance Painter, but the results were extremely poor. The normal maps weren’t clean, and a lot of details didn’t transfer properly. I didn’t want those problems to affect my textures later, so I switched to Marmoset Toolbag.
Marmoset Toolbag made the baking process so much easier. I simply placed the high-poly meshes in the high folder and the low-poly in the low folder, set the cage distance, and baked everything cleanly. The output included layered Photoshop files, which allowed me to tweak the Ambient Occlusion and Normal Maps manually where needed.
This stage took about a week in total, including problem-solving and switching software. It was frustrating at first, but in the end, I got clean bakes that captured all the details from my sculpt.