Original subtitles

We are now almost ready for rigging. There's just one last step involved and

that's to apply some of the modifiers and optimize the model for efficient

rigging. So as you can see we have different modifiers applied along the

model like the mirror modifier here and their subdivision modifier. There's still

skin modifier on the branches and stuff like that so I want to get rid of that

and basically at the end of this chapter we'll have a pure mesh ready for rigging.

So right now I will just select all, press shift D to duplicate, enter and

press M to move this to backup collection. So we saved all of our

objects. If we need to go back and edit something because these are destructive

operations they will alter the mesh and change its geometry. So first of all we

can start with the body and first of all I want to apply mirror modifier. We

can't have mirror modifier active for the rigging because they're in the right

part of the armature. Obviously if we need to move the hand separately and

stuff like that and there is a subdivision modifier with two levels of

subdivision. Right now I want to reduce this to one and let me uncheck the

optimal display so we actually see the resulting mesh and now if we enable

wireframe overlay this is what we will be getting if we apply this subdivision

modifier right away and I kind of like this density I think it will be enough

for some basic deformation with the armature. So we can just click apply and

you might have noticed there are some of these dents created on the texture

because we painted with the two levels of subdivision over these locally UV

islands so if we go to the texture paint mode you can just select the fill tool

pick up this color paint everything in between the islands with the same color

and you will get rid of that. So sometimes these errors might occur when

you're trying to keep the model editable as long as possible and then you try to

paint the textures and stuff like that and then you need to apply those

modifiers. Don't worry about that maybe in this case it would be better to apply

the subdivision before the painting and paint over the high poly islands but

then again if we would need to change something change the geometry it's

generally harder to work with more dense geometry. So it's not a big issue it's

just something you need to keep in mind. We can now switch back to the layout

view and we no longer have any modifiers on the body if we go into the edit mode

you can see this is much denser mesh but still there are all those seams the UVs

still work so this is basically ready to go and we can now move on to other

objects. So the second one should be the mask it's one of the most prominent

objects on the scene it will be most lighted probably in the end result so we

can reduce the viewport subdivision on the subdivision modifier to 1 it's still

dense enough and right here if we disable optimal display once again and

enable the wireframe overlay you can do this with the Q if you remember. This is

a little bit more dense than the body but at the same time again this will be

the most prominent object on the scene and it's a little bit more detailed so

there are these radiuses and steeper angles and details so it obviously needs

a little bit more dense geometry. So I think this will be okay if we just

apply this. So that's the mask there's no longer any mirror modifier because we

applied it to have some of these differences on the left and right side

to create some visual interest here and there and for the feathers I wouldn't

add any subdivision modifier there or anything but still there is a mirror

modifier we'll need to apply that and it would be very tedious to go feather

to feather and apply mirror modifier so there's an easier way how to do this we

can select the mask the head and branches and hit H every time to hide

those and now we can just drag a selection around those feathers so we'll

need to shift click one of those to have an active object that we want to merge

those into and let's press ctrl J to join them into one mesh and then we can

apply this mirror modifier for all of those so click apply and now we have all

of those as one mesh and UV islands are just duplicated over one another so the

texture still works so this is for the feathers the head was okay but I can see

here right away that this neck might not be enough for the rigging so we can

select this loop right here and drag it out a little bit and maybe even press E

then Z and extrude and scale this a little bit down so we have so we have a

little bit more space there to work with the armature so let me tab out and now

if we press alt H will unhide everything we have then these branches so let's

select those and just press the slash key on the numpad to isolate them into

a local view and here there's a little bit more going on we have the skin

modifier will which we will need obviously to apply then there's a

subdivision modifier and even the mirror modifier so we need to get rid of all of

those and first I will apply the skin modifier here and let's leave subdivision

as last and we can even move it in the modifier stack down as last so but

before we apply mirror modifier I want to simplify the geometry on this a little

bit if we tab in you can see the mesh that the skin modifier created and the

skin modifier creates these even loops along the length of the object which we

don't need basically so if we start alt and shift clicking them we can select

more of those and press ctrl X to just delete them but here it might modify

your angles so either you create that angle on your own by beveling this edge

so you can press ctrl B and create a bevel there and basically choose the

radius you want for those or if you want to make this a little bit more

simple you can just leave some of those that define those angles but at the same

time I feel like these branches would benefit for a little bit deeper angles

so I will now just hold alt and shift and select all of these loops that I

don't need I will just leave out those defining the corners there so ctrl X for

quick edge dissolve and here as well so alt shift click to select some of these

you control X and this might look a little bit tedious right here but keep

in mind that that these additional loops in combination with the subdivision

modifier later would create thousands of unnecessary faces and vertices so that's

something you don't want to have when you try to rig something when you need

to maybe animate it later and here I don't plan to do any animation but at

the same time some performance issues might occur if you have the geometry too

dense

okay so I think that was the last of them and now if you look at your model

this is looking a little bit more organic but maybe a little bit too much

so I want to add some of these supporting loops so with ctrl R I want

to create some of these end loops which will make the end points not that sharp

and just here and there maybe you don't need to touch all of those and now you

can basically decide where you want some of these steeper angles so here I want

to select this loop and bevel this with three segments here as well

so now we are adding some of this geometry but we have a full manual

control over where we want this to be more dense and where we want a little

bit of a steeper angles so I think this looks good for now and now that we

managed to clean up this a little bit more we can tab out and apply the mirror

modifier and apply one level of subdivision okay let me go out of the

local view now there are only these clothes and a little bit details like

the talisman or the pendant left and this will be quite easy to handle so

let's select this piece of cloth and we added the solidify modifier so we saw

this would look with some thickness I want to remove this for a while this was

just for a preview purposes we will make this thicker later when this is all

rigged and if we disable optimal display here and enable wireframe overlay I

think this looks good so we can just apply the subdivision there with the one

level of viewport subdivision and now this is still the curve so we'll need to

convert this to mesh you can check it out how this will look with just the one

one resolution level on the curve I think the two will be fine here so let's

just press Q and convert this to mesh from curve right now this is a mesh

object with no modifiers on it okay and one last thing here again I want to

remove the solidify modifier disable the optimal display so we actually see the

mesh and this is a little bit more dense than the body underneath if we disable

this this is just too basic so we need some subdivision there and I think the

one level will be just fine but we need to apply more modifier here as well and

apply that subdivision there on that mesh now for this part this is the same

as the belt here so let's just press Q and convert to mesh from curve and again

I've created the quick menu by right-clicking on this option here and

adding two quick favorites and the last thing here the talisman itself you can

see we have some bevel there and some subdivision so if I disable this right

now we can see how this looks without the subdivision and basically the bevels

should be enough but there's a little bit of a weird shading there if we

disable subdivision but we can easily fix that with normals so just remove the

subdivision here we won't need that and we'll enable harden normals and that's

the option on the bevel modifier that will basically adjust the normals so

that the large flat parts are shaded nice but you can see the warning here

that we need to enable auto smooth in object data properties so that the

blender can take care of the normals so let's just switch to the object data

properties here enable that auto smooth and we can increase this angle all the

way to 180 degrees so we give the blender full control over all the angles

and basically now the bevel modifier control the shading normals and if you

look at it now this is no different than it was with the subdivision modifier

apart from this hole here but I can live with this compromise when we can save so

much of the geometry just by using the bevel modifier so let's apply the bevel

modifier so this is for the talisman itself and now let me just click through

all of these objects and there are no more modifiers there there's no mirror

modifier so this is one solid mesh if we enable the wireframe overlay we can

see the mesh density right there and I think this is fairly consistent if you

look at the size of these faces there are no like very dense part apart from

these details here on the mask but as I said before this is the prominent

feature and we need this steep angles there and some of these detailed areas

but all in all I think this is quite consistent mesh density and we can use

this for rigging right away