Retopology Part 2. The process is making me go

So I finished the retopology, but when I compared my retopology with other YouTubers and other 3D artists, I find that my retopology is flawed with a lot extraneous edge loops. Furthermore, I learned that the approach to retopology for 3D animation is different. I was interested in 3D art because I was interested in making 3D figurines. But after doing some more digging on retopology and 3D animation, now I'm thinking about doing some 3D animation, which means I might have to redo the retopology to make it optimized for 3D animation.
So I feel like I'm at a crossroads on where to go with 3D art at the moment since I'm more used to creating 2D art, and there are A LOT of tools and features on Blender.

Here is my original sculpt along with my retopologized 3D art.

Based on my limited knowledge, yeah. Based on one of 3D Animator Dikko's video on 3D modeling for animation, animating the figure would be more optimized if the polygons on the figure were arranged a certain way. I followed another approach from Bran Sculpts, but I was overzealous in how much polygons I was adding to my figure during the retopology phase. So I created way more work on myself unfortunately, and this has led to some odd areas in my model where some polygons/faces look unevenly spaced.

But this has been a good learning experience for me. I'm still afraid to jump into 3D animation frankly, but I also can't help but feel excited about the possibilities of what else I could do with it.

Wow, these are amazing ! I really enjoy the mixed media approach in the last one, mixing live action with 2D and 3D animation.

Yeah, I should start with something easy in order to not get too discouraged. I guess the other challenge would be trying to balance doing 2D and 3D art

While I'm setting aside my character model, I decided to return to illustration. I plan to redo the flower composition (the one where my character was flying past my flower). I am modeling a 3D flower, partly for reference and partly for practicing on Blender so that I don't get rusty with the program. I still need to add some more branches.

I'm not done with my flower yet, but I am very proud of combining two parts together with relatively "smooth" and "clean" topology. I'll have to add in some edge loops and resize and readjust some areas as I keep going though.

Finally done modeling my 3D Flower. I might texture this later, but for now, I think this is good enough for my illustration

Ok, I probably didn't even need to create the 3d model of the flower in the first place. I feel like I could have free-handed the flower. However, I still got some good practice in with 3D modeling in Blender. So far, I've been pushing myself in composition, keeping in mind the foreground, midground and background and looking up references of environments to see what other details I could add to the drawing. I'm going to add some screen tones and some color next. The white areas are where I'm going to convey how the rain lands on the environment.

Thank you for your critique! I will definitely try to address all of the issues that you have brought up!!! It's a good thing I haven't put in any shadows yet haha

Based on snakker's critique, I fixed the foreground's flowers, changing up the direction of the branches and some of the details so that they're not too repetitive. I also tried to make the flowers' petals and leaves more droopy so that there is a more depressed feeling to the illustration. I also changed up the tattoos on Freya to conform to the contours of her body so that the foreshortening doesn't look too off anymore. I also added more of her wings on her right side because I want to give some more info to the viewer on how her wings looked, but they are currently damaged. I also made some changes to the trees' branches. My fixes look pretty sketchy right now, but I plan to tighten up the details, like the details and contours of the flowers' stems and Freya's tattoos and the line quality overall.

I've been working on a very buff and muscular 3d figure that I plan to draw over in order to create character design iterations for at least 2 characters [they will not be in the same worlds, but they are fantasy-related]. I could have just drawn the figure on Clip Studio, but I wanted to keep up with practicing 3d sculpting in Blender.

I'm still working on my illustration, but I plan to do some comic book coloring studies and learn how to color in line art better so that my illustration can look as best as it can be.

Here is my line art of my illustration. Next is figuring out the coloring.

DemonFairyFlower_Illustration_WIP3.jpg2480x3508 2 MB

Aaaagh I can't unsee it anymore Thank you for pointing it out! I'll have to fix this. Thank goodness for layers lol

Yeah I'm on discord. I'm not super active on it – especially recently, but I do check from time to time whenever I remember/get the chance to check.