Leaving my safety zone :)

Artwork Works in Progress
1

Hi,

I know compositing, edit meshes, UV-mapping and all that, but now I’m going for learning how to create nature and characters by sculpting. Totally new for me. I’m a noob again and feel lost in the workflow.

I have made this piece of log that you can see below.
This I made the following way:

  1. Went straight in to sculpting, “dynotopo on” and started sculpting away. Feels that I understand the basic here and have got a few tip from the net as well.
  2. When I felt that the log looked ok I went out and thought of UV-mapping, but then again I saw quickly that this should not be possible, so… yes… now I understand why I should learn retopology as well. (Have not though yet).
  3. So, I handpainted the log (and yes, you have to do some UV-mapping there as well, but not the same thing)
  4. To get more physical bumps I did subdivide the log twice and then added displacement, using my handpainted image.

Now the questions:

  1. Is this an ok way to go or am I totally lost here?
  2. In my log below I subdivided and added bumps using displacment. Should I instead sculpture that as well (using texture htat matches the bumps I would like to produce)?
  3. If I would like to UV-map using a finished image and not handpaint, could I UV-map before sculpting and get a good result in the end? In this case it’s a fairly simple cylinder, so the changes are not that big compared to the end result. Then I have all the seams and everything from start… or is this the wrong way to go?

Is the result below ok or did I miss anything vital (don’t mind the grass… focus on the log). Only 150 samples, so it’s more so you get a grip of what I’m trying to achieve.

I know I can google and YouTube it all, but I found it hard to get all question answered. Either they show sculpting or they show UV-mapping or retopology, but I have not found a good place to get the complete flow, so I’ll try here and see if you have any directions or pointers for me.

Liggande_Träd_2.jpg1919×1079 386 KB

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Looks ok to me, only thing that sticks out is the glossiness of the bark area. Also it depends on the type of tree it is supposed to be as to what the bark should look like. And yes using dyno causes the triangle poly’s which is a nightmare to unwrap. I am not much of a sculptor myself just messed around a few times with it but in sculptris and then brought it over into blender. It has the option to create a bump and normal map in sculptris and you can use those in blender providing you don’t change the physical shape of the object. But then again there may be a way to do so in Blender as well but being I am new to the sculpt world I am just mentioning things I have found. (may be wrong may not be) I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong though. But for something like this I think maybe just a cylinder would work and then use a subdivision modifier and then find or create a texture then apply a displacement modifier using the normal map and it will deform the mesh to give you the bumps and such.

3

Thanks for feedback,

I have now gone through little more material and understand that in most cases it will be 1) Creating base mesh (like I did with cylinder), 2) Sculpt (even the tiniest things), 3) Retopo the sculpted one ,4) UV-map the newly created from the retopo, 4) Bake a normal map (and additional ones as well if needed) from the sculpted object. 5) Then add material as a last step (using the baked map + other stuff as well) on the retopo object.

In most videos they are talking about baking when making games, but as I understand it, it will be useful even in my example with log above to reduce vertices and add render speed later on without destroying the look and feel of the object.

So… just to practise now, so I can master another area in Blender as well :).