If you missed it, make sure to check out my Milestone 2 Research Document, as it contains a lot of information that I didn’t get to cover here on the blog. For example which methods and workflow that I’m going to use now during the Production Phase.
And what will I be doing now then? Well I will use all the techniques that I’ve researched and tried out during the previous phases to create a game character. First of all I need to know how the model will look, therefore I have done some concepts. Since I will use an existing rig, I started with a silhouette which would fit that rig and then from that I’ve made some variations, trying out different approaches I could take. When I felt that I had a rough idea of where I wanted to take the concept I started to make some new, slightly more detailed thumbnails. Again, here I’m just brainstorming, trying to see what I want to do and also what I don’t want to do.
I leave you for now with these thumbnails. If you like anyone in particular, comment!
Next: More concepts…
I’ve now uploaded all the documents and a movie-clip for the Milestone 2 Delivery.
Milestone 2
/Dimitris Themelios
To be honest, sculpting inorganic objects in ZBrush is not really something I feel comfortable with at all yet. Although you can use it with adequate results for “sketching” a model, I don’t feel that it offers the control I need to accurately define hard shapes and edges. Because even if you put in the effort and make really clean masks and alphas and work with a really high polycount, if you later want to make some more global changes you will have to redo all your detail.
In Maya however you can move around your detail as much as you want without ruining the integrity of the rest of the mesh. And even though it can get a bit time-consuming to keep your mesh in quads and your edgeloops and topology flowing efficiently, you still get the results you want a lot faster than you would in ZBrush(if you can even get the same results in ZBrush that is…).
So I will therefore use subdivision modeling in Maya to make my hard surface models. Though I might use ZBrush to make some minor inorganic details within organic surfaces, such as buttons on a shirt, etc.
/Dimitris Themelios
Next: Resurfacing in Maya…
Another way to make high-poly organic models is by modeling it with regular polygons inside an application like Maya and then subdividing it to achieve a smoother look. As with the sculpting approach you need to start with the larger shapes here as well. But I’d say it’s even more important here because if you want to do larger changes later on, when you have a lot of polygons to work with, it’s going to be a hassle to redirect your edgeloops and rework your topology. Therefore it’s really important with this approach to know beforehand what you want to do and how your topology will look, because you are working with the form, shape and topology all at the same time.
One problem with polygonal modeling is that it can easily get out of hand with the amount of polygons that you have to work with. On the other hand you want to decide yourself how the shapes look and you need polygons to define that, so it’s not just the smoothing process that’s defining your shape. You therefore need to find a middle ground where you have something that is manageable but at the same time has enough polygons to support the shape that you intended.
So if you know pretty much what you are doing this method let’s you start with making decisions on how the topology will be early on. However, because for games you will normal map this detail, this isn’t really important. For example this ear that I’ve tested on, the base mesh is way too detailed to be used as an ingame mesh, but I needed those polygons to define the shape of the ear. So i would need to make a new mesh to project the high-poly onto anyways, and thus defeating the purpose of this approach. However, if you are working from a reference that you need to match exactly this method might still be good since you get a lot of control.
Also, depending on the complexity of what you are modeling, you might come to a point where you just can’t add some details because it would involve too many edgeloops and too much work. Then it’s probably smartest to either take it into ZBrush or paint the detail in Photoshop and convert it to a normal map which you can then overlay over your other normal map.
/Dimitris Themelios
Next: Hard Surface Modeling…
Although starting a sculpt from a generic basemesh with evenly distributed quads has its advantages, there is a drawback. Since you haven’t defined in the topology where your detail will go, you will find yourself needing more and more polygons in certain areas such as the eyes and nose of a face. To get to the level of detail that you want in these areas you will have to raise the subdivision level and consequently raise the polygon density in areas where you don’t need as much detail, such as the back of the head. This is a problem since, even though ZBrush does very well at handling very dense meshes, there is a limit to how many polygons your computer can display at once. Also, you might experience problems when exporting your sculpt to applications like Maya which can’t handle large density meshes as well as ZBrush.
The solution is to change the topology of your mesh by putting more polygons in areas that need the extra detail and keeping the density low in large, smooth areas. Luckily this can be done rather fast in ZBrush. All you do is draw guidelines of how you want your topology to flow on the mesh so you pretty much know what you want to do before you start. Then you just connect-the-dots with a ZSphere that you’ve put in “Edit Topology Mode”. When you are done with your topology you project the detail from the original mesh to the new one and hopefully you will have a mesh which has the same amount of detail as the original but with a lot less quads.
This is a fast test I did in about 5 minutes, if you put a little more time into it you could probably shave off some more polygons, but it atleast puts my point across. As you can see there’s no noticable difference between the two meshes but the new one has considerably less polygons.
What I’ve talked about here is primarily on changing the sculpting topology and not animation topology. You can however use the same method, to make a topology that is good for animation, to your advantage.
Next: Subdivision Modeling in Maya…