help - breakdown on character posing workflow

WaYWO

Hi,
I don't know how i'm supposed to "pose" a character really. it should be done from start?(with base body), at the end?,  rigged or not ?, some interesting mix between workflows, or solution to make great poses in a short amount of time?

thomasp

it would help to be a little more specific. are you talking about doing poses for a sculpted highres character or a game-ready model, or anything in-between?

FWIW i always stick a rig in and if the model is dense, create a lowpoly proxy geometry out of it that i skin and then use as a skinning proxy for my actual model to derive the weighting from. much quicker than skinning a complex mesh on it's own. in the case of posing a high res mesh in Z or mudbox this can then be used to quickly rig a subdiv level 1 of any sculpt and reimport that into the sculpting app as a deformation layer onto the model for further refinement.

rig and skin don't need to be very tuned if all you're after is poses. you can bake down the skinning pretty early on and continue to refine the geometry. what rig and skin give you over e.g. just using transpose in Z is the ability to adjust and create poses with already acceptable deformations and decent control over stretching. i find myself tweaking them a lot in the early stages and just fudging everything in Z is not my style.

WaYWO

thomasp said:

it would help to be a little more specific. are you talking about doing poses for a sculpted highres character or a game-ready model, or anything in-between?

FWIW i always stick a rig in and if the model is dense, create a lowpoly proxy geometry out of it that i skin and then use as a skinning proxy for my actual model to derive the weighting from. much quicker than skinning a complex mesh on it's own. in the case of posing a high res mesh in Z or mudbox this can then be used to quickly rig a subdiv level 1 of any sculpt and reimport that into the sculpting app as a deformation layer onto the model for further refinement.

rig and skin don't need to be very tuned if all you're after is poses. you can bake down the skinning pretty early on and continue to refine the geometry. what rig and skin give you over e.g. just using transpose in Z is the ability to adjust and create poses with already acceptable deformations and decent control over stretching. i find myself tweaking them a lot in the early stages and just fudging everything in Z is not my style.

thank you for replying, you just covered the two, now videos or tutorials on the process?

Eric Chadwick

What software are you using? That will determine what search terms make the most sense.

WaYWO

my main package is maya, and i can jump sometime between Maya and Zbrush... But if there are new tools to learn I'm not afraid too...