Noob question: what is your opinion about start working in sculpting programs?
polycounter lvl 3
Hi everyone. I was recently listening a 3d artist about the differents workflows in art gaming and he told me he has a negative opinion about people who start working in Zbrush or Mudbox and then retopologizing the mesh of an object. He considers it a very dirty workflow. Like put the cart before the horse.
As a newbie I would like to know the opinions of people in Polycount. If you agree and it is better start to work from 3ds Max, Maya or Modo, or on the contrary you don't agree.
Thanks for your patience.
As a newbie I would like to know the opinions of people in Polycount. If you agree and it is better start to work from 3ds Max, Maya or Modo, or on the contrary you don't agree.
Thanks for your patience.
Replies
The freedom the application affords an artist/designer is the luxury of creating forms or designs that are surprising. For visualizing existing concepts ZBrush affords a flexible production workflow with very unique tools. The general idea is that beginners that miss the : box step miss an appreciation of topology. I think that is true at the very start, but soon remedied. I am fairly sure there are engineers that find poly modelling a very dirty workflow, because polys are an approximation of a surface, and only CAD/spline modelling can reproduce a formed line to an accuracy of 0.000001 mm, or something like that.
Triangulation is only bad for creating uv's. Other than that, it is very, VERY flexible form of creating pieces of geometry
EDIT: Triangles are bad for animation as well :P
That said, the Halo 2 Anniversary GDC talk was about exactly that... They found it to be incredibly useful, and from my understanding even shipped a few models essentially unchanged. I have been using Simplygon to create preliminary decimated models for my work, that I then further process. It's been a great success for me as well.
decimation can have its uses, it's very case dependent.
as is the use of basemeshes, in my experience if its not in a concept or idiationphase, productions are heavily basemesh oriented. if the concept is done and approved not super rough i tend to work with basemeshes as well. Of course this comes down to the style, but usually basemeshes tend to deliver cleaner results. if it's a very gritty style, sure go ahead, wing it in zbrush.
Usually when people say "it depends", they then expound on why and give practical examples. There are also typically links to the plethora of resources this site has accumulated over the years.
the question is just not as easily answered as "yes starting with zbrush is a bad idea", leading people into dogmas is bad, no matter if the bold claim is "don't start in zbrush" or "triangles are bad for unwrapping".
there are times when starting in zbrush is perfectly fine and there are times when good preparation and clean basemeshes are key to the final outcome. to answer this matter more deeply it will always need context. I don't know which tutorial the Op is referring to, maybe in the context of it the statement makes more sense.
Just like yours made more sense when you gave a little more despription i don't neccesarily agree to it entirely, but in general, yeah a clean mesh unwraps better than a messy decimated one. But both have their uses and in no case does the triangulation influence the unwrap, because as you said, after all everything is triangulated.
for a piece of production art i would indeed consider a solid preparation outside zbrush with a focus on reusability, animation-friendliness and so on essential and would agree with that artist in saying that starting with a sculpt has the potential to end you up with a dirty result that you can't change or reuse without losing or corrupting work and that such an asset can drive others mad if they have to work with it.
the ways in which these tools can fail you is something you learn from experience, not by following some hard rule though.