Current
Materials Finalized, see pg2 for more information.
Original Post
My demo reel will be made up partly of new models (such as Anon), and remade old models like this one. You may remember Toki from a few months ago. The modeling and texturing work were ok, but I felt I could do better.
Therefore, I decided to redo it almost from scratch… but instead of modeling it the same way I did the last time, I chose to try out a new work flow:
Skip down if you don’t care for the details
> Model a simple character model of around 1,000 or so polys.
-I’m using the old Toki model of around 7,000
polygons in this step.
> Take into sculpting application and use the tools to sculpt the character’s shape out… without getting too detailed.
-I used Mudbox, though I could have easily used Silo 2 beta
or Blender 2.43 RC3 - I stopped subdividing at around
300,000 polygons.
> Retopologize sculpture into an animate-able mesh of around 10,000 polygons or more.
-Blender 2.43 has the exact same retopology
tool (with a minor improvement) as Silo 1.42… but
Silo 2 Beta has a feature called surface snapping -
allowing me to literally model on top of the
sculpture - as opposed to drawing the topology out -
very much like TopoGun.
(This is where I am now.)
Of course, the following is split into two sections, one for Blender, and one for Mudbox…
Blender
After this point, you could just use Blender to…
> Unwrap the uvmap. (for texturing later in Photoshop or Gimp)
> Save a backup of your character model!!
-Multires is a destructive process - if you change
your mind later and do not have the original mesh,
you are screwed and will have to make do with the
bottom level. Note: A good saving practice is
saving different revisions of your scene file.
> Sculpt on top of the new mesh with Multires system, which is fully animate-able… no need for displacement maps.
Although you may have problems at higher resolutions ( 1 million plus ).
Mudbox (what I’m going to do)
> Unwrap the uvmap in Blender.
- I could use Silo 2 beta… but it’s a beta.
Both programs use the same LSCM unwrap algorithm.
> Transfer mesh to Mudbox for detail sculpting.
- Blender obj export has a problem, where other
programs that open the obj files, end up with two of
the same mesh, one normal, and the other faceted and
laying on it’s back. Luckily, this ‘cruft’ model
can be deleted in Mudbox.
- Also, Mudbox’s object space is large, therefore I
will have to scale the mesh’s vertices up by 10
times before exporting.(not the object itself, I
want to scale it’s local space coordinates up,
not its global space). Scaling it up in Mudbox does
not solve this issue, though I believe this problem
is only temporary. Why scale up before export?
Because the brush tools are hyper sensitive on small
models.
> After high detail sculture is completed, make 16 or 32 bit displacement map and export the first level.
- work done on higher levels is propagated down
distructively just like Blender.
Thus, the first level is different from the
original imported mesh in that it’s “smoother”, this
makes it perfectly ready for displacement. In other
words, don’t apply the displacement on the original
mesh.
> In Blender 2.43 RC or another studio app, apply the displacement map in the modifyer stack. Make sure it’s applied after the subdivision modifyer.
Other
> If you have made a NORMAL MAP, use the original mesh as the low detail model, the sculpted mesh as the high detail model and apply the resulting map on the original mesh, not the bottom level of the sculpted mesh.
My work so far
This is what I have so far…
(sculpture not shown)
(Blender render)
(right side of sculpture was deleted for efficiency.)
edit: Images reduced to links
)
Good job there.
