Pipeline without Max

EmAr

Hi guys! We are planning to start a small project with a team of 4-5 people with UDK or CryEngine 3 if they provide a conveninent licensing option. We cannot afford to buy 3ds Max(or another major app) licenses for every artist(at least 2 artists). So, we are considering a pipeline without Max. Here are the tools I am planning to use:

Silo - SubD and low poly meshes, UV creation. Problem: does not support smoothing groups

ZBrush - sculpting

Messiah: Studio(no license yet) - rigging and animations. Problem: this does not support smoothing groups properly either. There's an angle limit for smooth/hard edges and that's all AFAIK.

iPi motion capture(no license yet) - we are not making a sports game or fighting game etc. this should be enough.

xNormal - all kinds of baking maps

Milkshape 3d - this supports smoothing groups but it's a pain to use.

Photoshop 6 - textures etc. (we don't have a license for a new version )



So, the major problem is smoothing groups. It can be solved by breaking edges until the animation step. Do you think it's reasonable to use broken edges in an animated game mesh? I think the vertex weighting step won't be perfect and cause problems.

Building models to fit a certain smoothing angle can be another solution but I don't know Messiah even exports them. The demo I installed won't export anything.

Any suggestion is more than appreciated. Thanks for reading.

almighty_gir

any of you got a student id?
free 3ds max.

EmAr

Oops forgot that bit, it's a commercial project. It says:

Thirty-six month licenses of Autodesk student software are not eligible for product upgrade or transfer to a commercial license.

almighty_gir

ahh okay, my bad.

can't blender do everything you want?

EmAr

Well, that's an option too. I never got used to Blender because of the different interaction style but I'll try again and see if we can learn it quickly.

Thanks for the suggestions

thomasp

seeing all these wonderfully different apps you have lined up there makes me think smoothing groups will be the least of your problems.

anyway, why wouldn't breaking the mesh work? sure makes no difference for skinning - or shouldn't. obviously you'd have to break it before going through xnormal to ensure normal maps come out correctly.

EmAr

hahaha I actually got used to the problems with the Silo-Zbrush-xNormal part. I'll even start predicting Silo's memory crashes sometime soon Kidding aside, you're right. That makes Blender sound like an even better alternative.

I'm curious that the vertices on the different sides of the broken edges will get the same bone weights. That can cause opening of the mesh. And correcting these by hand would take a lot of time. I may be wrong too of course.

Snowfly

Asking because I'm curious- if you're using normal maps already, why the need for smoothing groups?

I'd recommend Blender if you can compromise on the art a bit. I like it, but it does have some drawbacks.


SubD - You're limited to 3 and 4 sided polygons, so hard surface modeling may be a bit of a challenge.

Sculpting - Can't push a ridiculous amount of polygons, so you'd have to sculpt up to mid-frequency and complement it with nDo maps. Depends on how beefy your hardware is though.

Baking - It does decent AO, very tweakable. Normal baking has no options though, so XNormal is still the better option here.

The vertex painting is very good too. I use it to lay down base colors and then bake that to a color map. It does 3D painting too, though pretty basic.

One thing I don't like is one of the normal map channels is flipped relative to what UDK uses.

Retopo - Works wonderfully. Snapping is responsive and accurate, and you can plan out your topology by sketching on the high poly with the grease pencil tool.

Smoothing Groups - Done through the Edge Split modifier. Mark hard edges on your mesh, and the verts are split at the modifier level. Best part is you only need to weight one vert on the original mesh, and the weight propagates to both verts on the split.

Rigging and animation - Fairly standard tools here, and everything you need. It's nothing fancy, but should be adequate.

I don't enjoy the weighting myself. It works like this- assign verts to a vertex group, and then name the bone you want them assigned to the same as the group. Then you can type in weights or weight paint, but unfortunately no vertex weight table.

that's about all I can come up with for now, 3D Coat might also be worth looking into, but if you want to keep your spending down, I'd stick with Blender.

Shadownami92

Yeah I would suggest using Blender, could probably then cut out Silo and Milkshape. I remember someone on here someone made a pretty good short rundown on Blender 2.5. I don't know how well the exporters for it are myself, but I'm pretty sure it handles smooth groups and has some decent free retopo tools in it.

Also I remember seeing some older Blender videos that showed some sort of .bvh file support. Not sure if that carried over to 2.5 yet but it could be a good thing to look into.

r_fletch_r

dont forget voidworld for modelling.

Before considering blender I would do some research on how good the FBX exporter is. that could be a real deal breaker. You may want to make a super simple rig and character and export it with animation to make sure its not gimped.

michi.be

AS far as I know Blender got a new UI and its easier to use now as before. But I played with it for a short time only.

EmAr

Snowfly, I use hard edges when I merge two different objects into a single mesh body. Like a big arm-ring on an arm:



The geometry is very simple here but sometimes I have to break the geometry for baking purposes and that gives me some seams in the normal map too. I know how to fix regular texture seams but normal maps confuse me. Is it possible to bake maps with broken geometry and no visible seams?

Thanks for the input everyone