Hey everyone!
Sorry in advance if thats a silly question. I’m still very much a noob and learning a ton right now. Since I’m currently looking into Mari and VFX creature workflows and I’m wondering if there is a preferred polycount in Blender. Of course the specs of my PC matter, but maybe you guys have experience or any tips for me regarding this topic?
I’m asking this mainly because I heard that in film, most of the artists don’t actually bake the high res details after sculpting, but retopo after a block out phase, UV and then sculpt details. The high detailed mesh is used for rendering in film, as far as I understand.
Is it realistic to try that in Blender, too? Is that a stupid question? Is this about using Subdiv?
Thank you so much in advance, I’m a bit confused at the moment.
What you describe is a fairly standard workflow- high poly meshes are retopologized for animation in Blender, during animation preview, no subdivision is used, and then during the actual render, subdivision is used. You can do this with the Simplify settings or by manually setting the Viewport to 0 and the render to 2 on the Subdvision modifier. Animation preview and posing is also usually done in solid view, rather than rendered.
As far as poly count goes- it depends on your computer, it also depends on how many bones are in the armature. A hard number is hard to pinpoint, but the lower, the faster. I’d recommend looking at some examples of animated meshes in Blender to get a feel for this. Dikko, on YouTube, has some absolutely incredible modeling for animation tutorials that I can’t possibly recommend enough
Ah okay, that makes sense
So just for clarification, my workflow could look something like this
Sculpt block out
Once I’m happy, retopo and UV
Continue sculpting until details are done
Texturing either with Mari or Blender
Rigging
Animating with preview (no subdivision)
So I’d have to either assign a subdiv modifier on the model and sculpt on this (so I can turn it off while animating) or use the Simplify settings as you mentioned.
Yeah that sounds like the perfect workflow to me if you have the ability, making 2D rough sketches of your animation can really help with getting the timing down, if you can’t get real time playback in Blender. I’ve also sometimes (back when I had a horrible computer) rigged and animated a super simple mannequin made out of cubes so I could get the animation timing in real time, then matched the poses and timing of the real character to the cube mannequin. I don’t recommend this unless you absolutely have to, it’s a lot more work overall.
Is this about using Subdiv?
