Whats your Character workflow?

Darkleopard

Hi all!

So i will be starting a character project for school next week. I am very new to character modelling ( i prefer props/environment) and i wanted to get some advice from the community on the workflow i should be aiming for.

I will be creating a military solider guy with armour similar to that in district 9. (Not to advanced but a little better then todays armour)

http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-180.htm

This looked fairly good, but i am not sure if there are a lot of different workflows out there or if there is one 'recommended' workflow

From that link there ive basically got this
1. Create base human mesh
2. Sculpt base human mesh
3. Create addons/clothes
4. Place addons/clothes over the character model
5. Take into sculpting program of choice and sculpt away details
6. Re-topologize (never done this before)
7. Textures, normals etc

So i have a question.
Sculpting the base mesh before adding clothes etc seems like a waste of time if the character is fully clothed/ Armoured. I can understand a little bit for definition under the clothes but is this recommended?

Any tips would be appreciated, i want to make sure i have a good idea of the process before i start on monday. Thanks!

Chimp

mine is:
1. concept
2. zsphere base
3. sculpt naked char
4. sculpt clothes
5. either sculpt or box model add-ons
6. retopologise all
7. fix, uv and bake
8. texture.

ericdigital

You don't need full definition but its smart to spend some time on the base and make sure the proportions are correct and make sense. Too often people rush into armor/clothing etc and end up really falling short on the anatomy of the figure.

Darkleopard

Thanks for the reply
Will be interesting to see how people do stuff

gilesruscoe

I do things in this order for my characters:

Zspheres, getting the overall shape with these is easier than dynameshing from a sphere/cube i find, so i spend about 15mins getting the right shape with zspheres, putting in fingers and other small extrusions at this point is optional - sometimes i do, sometimes i don't. Alot of the time things like that get merged together when you switch it to a polymesh.

Dynamesh, after that i whack on dynamesh and work in the forms with various clay brushes, this gives you a pretty good base shape to start properly sculpting.

Final anatomy sculpt, i normally do the whole body detailing even if some of its hidden, just helps understand underlying shapes when doing clothing/armour.

Export a decimated version at around 80-100k polys to maya, using Diamant tools i retopo over it to create the base shapes of armour and clothing, then extrude these out.
http://www.rd3d.com/ <Diamant tools link.

Any hard surface stuff i do most of in maya just using traditional sub-D modelling, then send to zbrush to do a detailing pass. Also keep any floating geo like screws/bolts as a seperate subtool when you export to zbrush, as they increase the polycount a heck of a lot when you sub divide.

Once i have everything in zbrush i tend to work from top to bottom sculpting and moving, making sure everything slots together properly.

Retopology, i just combine all my subtools, decimate to around 300k polys and then take that back into maya to retopo with Diamant tools again.

Unwrap i use Diamant tools for aswell, it's got great edge selection tools and the UV editor is great.

Baking, xnormal, so much stuff on polycount about this i don't really need to mention it.

Texturing, i just do everything in photoshop and then import the maps into mudbox as a diffuse texture and use the clone brush to fix up any seams.

Here's a character i'm doing at the moment, with some of the steps i took to do it.

Anatomy sculpt (not the final one but the only pic i have):


Retopo'd armour pieces in maya:



sub div modelling of armour bits:



Step by step of how i go about making the parts in maya:




Then the detail pass is pretty much just going through and bashing everything up with brushes of your choice:



Hope that gives you some kind of insight into how i work, i'm not the most fantastic artist, but thought i'd share anyway

Darkleopard

Wow so detailed. Thanks so much! Every little bit of info helps. Im so new to everything that i thought the best way to learn was to soak up everyone's knowledge like a sponge.

Im still very new to zbrush so im not to comfortable modelling straight into it with zspheres etc. Characters arnt my strength either so i find it best to take it slow in maya and learn the shapes. We will be learning more about zbrush in class over the next couple weeks so i hope to vastly improve.

So what i think i will do then is this.
1. Base model in maya
2. Take to zbrush or mudbox and sculpt in base anatomy.
3. Make all my armour pieces separately and place over the base mesh, sculpt those as needed.
4. re-topo
5. Bake/textures etc

Couple questions, sorry if they sound dumb but i honestly have no idea

1. For a high poly mesh (hard surface like armour/weapons) do most people just make the entire thing in maya/max and use zbrush to get the normal maps.
If so, do you make a high poly version in say maya, then take a duplicate, make it low poly while keeping the shapes, then export the high into zbrush to get the normal map? I am aware that some people make low poly first then the high aswell but same basic question.

2. Does maya have any sort of normal map generation like zbrush. Can i make a high/low poly gun for instance and generate a normal from maya. I dont think it has any of this functionality but it never hurts to ask

3. I suppose it depends on what the characters being used for but do people generally tend to combine all the objects of the model then retopo everything together, or keep some objects separate? I think ive seen a bit of both so any thoughts on this are appreciated.

Im sure i'll think of more to ask soon. Thanks in advance everyone!

Darkleopard

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

gilesruscoe

Your approach is the more classic character workflow, works just as well as any other way. What kind of character do you have in mind to model?

1 - I do all my hard surface in maya, some people like to do hardsurface in zbrush using the polish/trim/planar tools, but i find it a little trickier than just modeling it. I use xnormal for baking normal maps, zbrush baker is a bit crappy i've heard.

2- Yep! Maya has transfere maps feature (animation tab, under the lighting drop down i believe) Only problem with baking from maya is that it isn't very good at handling millions of polys at a time, so you have to bake from heavily decimated stuff which won't give as good results.

3- Depends on whats what, i try to include as much as possible in a single mesh, but things that hang from the character are better off as seperate meshes. Sometimes head/arms are seperate meshes if they go into a suit of armour or something.

Darkleopard

Im going to be making a solider that has slightly better armour then today's soldiers. Im thinking district 9 (the movie) type armour.

Thanks for the reply and info! I downloaded Xnormal last night and im going to try it out soon.

MainManiac

Open a male basemesh I made previously

Edit the shit out of it and model accessories for it

UV

textures

But I dont really do high poly

_DeadPixel_

Nice work Giles.

My preferred workflow is to start with a pre-modelled generic male/female anatomical model; next I change the proportions to match the given concept.
That way you save a day or 2 screwing around making a base mesh for your character.
I never touch zspheres because they're messy - quick, but messy.
For any clothing/armour I prefer to use an external modelling program like Maya or Max because you have much more control. Sculpting it in Zbrush means you'd need to retopologise it and all that jazz later down the line; creating it all in Maya/Max avoids that.
I try my best to start with a clean base mesh to avoid having to retopologise anything; but if it can't be avoided I decimate the mesh, export it to maya and do it there, or use the Zsphere feature in Zbrush if it would be quicker.
UVs I usually use Headus, but lately I've switched to 3DCoat.
Maya's "Transfer Maps" feature is really cool, but software like Xnormal is much easier on your machine, I'm planning to switch to that with my current project.
I hardly ever texture things, but if I did I'd use a mixture of photoshop and the Zbrush Zapplink feature.
Material shaders I create parallel with texturing.

To be honest man, 90% of any workflow is personal preference.
A mixture between speed/comfort is the best pipeline for anyone.

njc6425

Character workflow is very subjective to each different person mine is:

1) Zsphere armature
2) Dynamesh sculpt
3) Full sculpt and texture (so far still in zbrush)
4) 3dCoat to retop and unwrap.
5) If possible export the zbrush high poly and use the 3dcoat obj as the low poly and use xnormal to bake out maps.

I prefer to leave all the technical stuff like topology UVs and what not right until the end, that way my design is uninhibitted and stronger

For the armour, if you use zbrush you can just mask out what you want the armour to be on the base mesh, extract that as a subtool and then send that to maya to work off of if you feel uncomfortable with hard surface sculpting (which most of us do haha). That way your armour will 100% conform with the human mesh

Hope this helps