Finished my first Hi-poly to Lo-poly Character sculpt.
vertex
This is my first full 3D character sculpt, starting with a hi poly model and then baking stuff down for lo poly.
model
I know a screwed up a lot of stuff on the way there. The topology is pretty awful. And I wasn't really sure how best to explode Bowser's parts into multiple separate pieces. I just took a class on Udemy on Blender so there's a lot of stuff about how best to optimize workflow and mesh that I'm just sort of cobbling together from what I can find online.
I would love critiques, espc on the technical side of things. I've been doing 2D art for years and 3D has been fantastic and really exciting! But I also don't really know what I'm doing.
My workflow was like this:
First I box modeled different pieces of Bowers using Blender and a sub-d modiifier. I then applied those modifiers and tried to boolean parts together in roughly the shape I wanted. This lead to some really gnarly meshes. I guess I shouldn't have done that. But a lot of times it just seems so much simplier to take parts and bool them together. But then that destroys the point of the subd mod I guess and I don't have a lo poly mesh to use later.
Next I sculpted out the rough 80% of the figure in Blender dynatopo sculpt. When I liked it, I fiddled around trying to figure out how I was going to remesh stuff and then bake it.
Eventually I decided to use zBrush. I really am not a fan of zBrush's UI, and I have trouble getting a hang of their sub-d levels, but the zRemesher and UV Master were great. Once I had a set of lo poly parts, and a set of hi poly parts, I went into marmoset and baked AO and normals for everything.
Then I blocked out some of the colors on the more detailed parts (like the belt) in Substance Designer. I also added some normal texturing and roughness/metal maps.
Then I ported it over to Photoshop and used the AO maps as a guide to paint the figure. I wanted to go for something that was using the PBR workflow but also wanted something with a kind of hand painted aesthetic. I don't think that quite came out the way I wanted. I think my next piece is going to be a lo poly hand painted thing. The high poly stuff is a frickin headache workflow wise and I'd like to do something shadeless where I can put more emphasis on the painterly quality of the maps.
Anyway, total hobbyist here but would love feedback or suggestions. I really need to improve my workflow more, espc on the initial base mesh and built up I think. Getting everything remeshed was a total pain. I thought I could get away with zRemesh and Instant Remesh but it was a total pain. Yeesh.
model
I know a screwed up a lot of stuff on the way there. The topology is pretty awful. And I wasn't really sure how best to explode Bowser's parts into multiple separate pieces. I just took a class on Udemy on Blender so there's a lot of stuff about how best to optimize workflow and mesh that I'm just sort of cobbling together from what I can find online.
I would love critiques, espc on the technical side of things. I've been doing 2D art for years and 3D has been fantastic and really exciting! But I also don't really know what I'm doing.
My workflow was like this:
First I box modeled different pieces of Bowers using Blender and a sub-d modiifier. I then applied those modifiers and tried to boolean parts together in roughly the shape I wanted. This lead to some really gnarly meshes. I guess I shouldn't have done that. But a lot of times it just seems so much simplier to take parts and bool them together. But then that destroys the point of the subd mod I guess and I don't have a lo poly mesh to use later.
Next I sculpted out the rough 80% of the figure in Blender dynatopo sculpt. When I liked it, I fiddled around trying to figure out how I was going to remesh stuff and then bake it.
Eventually I decided to use zBrush. I really am not a fan of zBrush's UI, and I have trouble getting a hang of their sub-d levels, but the zRemesher and UV Master were great. Once I had a set of lo poly parts, and a set of hi poly parts, I went into marmoset and baked AO and normals for everything.
Then I blocked out some of the colors on the more detailed parts (like the belt) in Substance Designer. I also added some normal texturing and roughness/metal maps.
Then I ported it over to Photoshop and used the AO maps as a guide to paint the figure. I wanted to go for something that was using the PBR workflow but also wanted something with a kind of hand painted aesthetic. I don't think that quite came out the way I wanted. I think my next piece is going to be a lo poly hand painted thing. The high poly stuff is a frickin headache workflow wise and I'd like to do something shadeless where I can put more emphasis on the painterly quality of the maps.
Anyway, total hobbyist here but would love feedback or suggestions. I really need to improve my workflow more, espc on the initial base mesh and built up I think. Getting everything remeshed was a total pain. I thought I could get away with zRemesh and Instant Remesh but it was a total pain. Yeesh.
Replies
The pose needs work. I can't tell what the action pose is, it feels all dissonnant.
If you're doing the hair like that, I find it far more clean, at least in the high poly, to make the "tufts" or "volume chunks" as separate subtools. In the low poly, you can retopo it all as one mass.
That belt buckle is looking really weird, especially as it smashes into the guys pectoral muscles. It looks like it can be better stacked and not like this really tight belt.
You should extend the legs out more in the T pose. Right now swaths of the hamstrings are fused to the calf muscles. This won't look good when the legs extend.
I like the beady eyes and lighting.
The belt design looks good to me. It seems way too thick though.
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?436326-Baking-Ambient-Occlusion-from-Hi-poly-to-lo
And here's a near finished matcap of the hi poly sculpt before I took it over to zBrush and unwrap, remeshed, added more detail etc:
Yeah the pose was a problem. I had some pretty nasty topology around the armpit, and I think my original T pose wasn't extreme enough so I had a huge amount of stretching. I wanted to have his arms raised over his head like he was doing a scary roar but it's stretched too much there. Also I didn't do any planning ahead when I sculpted his mouth as a single unit so it ended up being impossible for me to really pose his mouth. I'm not entirely clear how to sculpt out a mouth without causing problems with intersecting geometry and stuff though. Also doesn't that cause zfighting for baking? The fundamental thing I don't understand is how separate I'm supposed to keep different parts of the meshes.
Also good point about the legs. I was going off instinct and only realized halfway through the mess I'd put myself in. I'm actually not entirely sure how to do t-poses for non-human characters? I see lots of human t-poses online, and I see lots of monsters on sketchfab, already posted, but not sure what best practices for monster t poses looks like.
I've seen people sculpt hair as separate subtools before, which is kind of what I did (I did all initial sculpting in Blender, and then ported each part separately to zbrush to work on extra detail and UV unwrap. I'm still not entirely sure how the subtool palette works in zBrush. It strikes me as very weird.).
But should I also separate the cuffs and the belt from the body? Should the horns be separate from the head? Should the spikes in the cuffs be separate from the cuffs?
Keeping parts separate that have different materials seems to make sense to me, but it also results in intersecting geometry. I also removed a lot of geometry from parts of the accessories that weren't visible (like the back of the belt) because it helped the UV Master wrap come out cleaner. But should I maybe have broken up parts of the belt further? I booled all the bolts onto the belt. The golden strips down the side were just extruded from the belt. But it occurred to me afterwards that maybe it would be better to extrude the strips, select them off into a separate object, and then keep the bolts separate from the golden strips also. Reasons to do this seem 2 fold:
1) keeping objects of different kinds of material separate seems to make sense to me. But is that actually good practice? Maybe good practice for when modeling or sculpting hi poly but not for when making the low poly?
2) I modeled the belt flat and warped it around his body. The faceplate was separate but the bolts and strips on the side were booled into the mesh, and as a result had some bad skewing on their warp around the body. It seems to me that if I kept them as separate objects and warped them each separately with the same modifier they would warp more evenly. (and if nothing else could be warped with a secondary re-positioned lattice that didn't have the same issues. )
Example of my precise hand-made retopology on my current character project, it took me about 3-4 days to retopo those parts you see in the image (exluding eyes). You have to really focus for creating a proper polygon loops with evenly distributed quads: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/pq/2set4qtcto77.jpg Even though your character is a non-human, the same principles of topology still applies to it.
For hard-surface models, if you've done your high poly with a proper sub-d modeling workflow, you can easily copy it, and optimize it down to your low poly. Also speaking of optimization, this character of yours is poorly optimized as well. So many unnecessary polygons in many places.
Secondly, do not UV unwrap your meshes in Zbrush with UV Master, it's bad. Use Blender for that, because once again you're in control.
Thirdly, study A LOT of anatomy before creating your next character from now on.
For separate parts you can simply use common sense. If something is separate in real-life, then it is separate. And it makes things easier, because you don't need to worry about fusing separate parts to one watertight topology mesh.
Tip for using Boolean, fix the topology when using boolean, because 90% of the time it's not perfect.
Oh yeah, your polygonal density is all over the place. The belt has WAY too many polys for what you really just need. The body topology overall is not gonna animate well; it has polys there just to account for volume. I think maybe why you may have had trouble posing is because you didn't retopologize for deformation. You should look through the Polycount Wiki for what good character topology looks like and generally means at a theory level/