Building My 3D Art Portfolio: Blog Post #3 - "Stylized Crab Cont."

Welcome back to the blog! My goal for this update was to have my crab remodeled and ready for texturing. In my last post, I shared my struggles with the baking process in Substance Painter. To give you some context, here is the reference photo I’m using for this project

Illustration by by @coralkate.art on Instagram

My previous posts involved a lot of research, so this week was more fixing and re-modeling. I realized I was dealing with strange shading issues, and the shell's ridges weren't baking as expected. Even after attempting to manually draw in the ambient occlusion (as seen in my last post, referencing Chiimera’s YouTube video, "How to Paint Over/Fix Normal Bakes | Substance ) . . . the model still didn't look quite right. I decided the best path forward was to remesh the sculpt and use RetopoFlow to add more deliberate topology. My goal was to give the low-poly model enough detail to capture those baked maps perfectly, but not create something too high-poly.

Ridge Baking Issues

After exporting and importing my project countless times and making minor adjustments, I still couldn't figure out why the sculpted details of my shell weren't displaying correctly after the bake. I decided to ask one of my professors for advice, and he asked me a surprising question: "Why is your model so low poly?" This caught me off guard; I had assumed a very low-poly base mesh was optimal for a project like this. However, my professor explained that my model was too low-poly, which was why the baking information wasn't appearing. I needed to provide enough 'surface area' for each ridge so the sculpted details had a proper place to land. Following this advice, I realized I had to remesh my model using RetopoFlow for a third time. A very time-consuming process, but a necessary one.

Crab Shell High Poly vs Low Poly (Before)

Crab Shell High Poly vs low Poly (After)

New vs Old Low Poly Model Topology

As you can see in the second version, I gave each ridge a dedicated vertex. Fixing the shell's geometry actually sparked a bit of a chain reaction; I started feeling picky about other parts of the model and decided to remodel those as well

Low Poly Crab (Before)

The eyes started to feel too big, and their positioning wasn't quite right. I also ended up remodeling the 'elbow' of the claw to feel like a more realistic joint. I even elevated the shell a bit more to give the crab a boxier shape, bringing it much closer to my original reference image.

Low Poly crab (After)

After re-topologizing my model for the third time, I finally felt good about its basic topology. With the mesh finally sorted, it was ready to be re-baked and prepared for texturing.

Old vs New Baked Crab

Looking at the second photo, you might notice the crab doesn't look very 'baked' - where are all the ridges? Well, I ultimately decided to delete the normal and ambient occlusion maps after all. You might be wondering, 'Wait, Rachel, wasn't that the whole reason you remodeled this three times?" Well, yes! But I was still having minor baking issues, and I eventually realized I could just paint the shadows, highlights myself. This gives me total control over the look, and I can decide exactly where every highlight sits and how deep every shadow goes.

Ultimately, I’m still glad I went through the retopology process. It pushed me to be more critical of the entire model, and the refinements I made to the silhouette really enhanced the final version. That’s a lot of crab pictures for one day! In my next post, I’ll be diving deeper into my actual texturing process. Until then!