Mudbox Sculpting workflow question...
polycounter lvl 6
Hi All,
I am about to try to sculpt my first full character model (for game asset) in mudbox and my question is this; am I likely to get better results by importing and sculpting the whole mesh as 1 object, ot by breaking it up into separate parts?
My concerns with leaving it as one object are that firstly certain parts of the model (e.g. under arms, fingers) will be hard to sculpt if I cannot hide other parts of the model. And secondly that if I leave it as one object I will have to extract maps with a higher ray trace distance all over the model, which will increase the chance of the finer detail areas recieving distortion.
So for these reasons (and also because my mesh doesnt have a particularily uniform poly size accross its entire surface) I thought it could be better to import my model as 5-6 separate objects (head, body, arms, hands, feet) and sculpt them like that.
My concern in doing this is that edges where the different objects meet may not behave the same as they would if they were attached, and maybe I will get errors and artifacts along the seams where the objects/uv islands meet (if I made the model into separate objects I would obviously cut it up along the uvw seams)
So with this in mind, can anyone suggest which technique is likely to give me the best results? Mostly when I have watched vidoes and tutorials people seem to sculpt character models as one object - so I am worrired that breaking it up is a bad idea. I was hoping somebody with more experience could advise me before I risk wasting a lot of time on my sculpt.
Thanks
I am about to try to sculpt my first full character model (for game asset) in mudbox and my question is this; am I likely to get better results by importing and sculpting the whole mesh as 1 object, ot by breaking it up into separate parts?
My concerns with leaving it as one object are that firstly certain parts of the model (e.g. under arms, fingers) will be hard to sculpt if I cannot hide other parts of the model. And secondly that if I leave it as one object I will have to extract maps with a higher ray trace distance all over the model, which will increase the chance of the finer detail areas recieving distortion.
So for these reasons (and also because my mesh doesnt have a particularily uniform poly size accross its entire surface) I thought it could be better to import my model as 5-6 separate objects (head, body, arms, hands, feet) and sculpt them like that.
My concern in doing this is that edges where the different objects meet may not behave the same as they would if they were attached, and maybe I will get errors and artifacts along the seams where the objects/uv islands meet (if I made the model into separate objects I would obviously cut it up along the uvw seams)
So with this in mind, can anyone suggest which technique is likely to give me the best results? Mostly when I have watched vidoes and tutorials people seem to sculpt character models as one object - so I am worrired that breaking it up is a bad idea. I was hoping somebody with more experience could advise me before I risk wasting a lot of time on my sculpt.
Thanks
Replies
i wont do it in different parts...
if you use subD as baking method there is no search distance...
the subD method is subdividing your mesh until it gets the same polycount as your highres...
this is called the limit surface... and then its looking where the vertex with the same ID is in your sculpted mesh... and bakes that data into a texture... so there should be no baking errors at all... the only drawback is that you have to use a mesh for baking that based in subD... so you cant bake onto a different topology...
if you like to bake onto a lowres mesh you have to bake twice... a version with high and a version with low search distance and paint it together in PS... or clean the texture in mud...
Thank you for the reply. I had a feeling that it may be a bad idea to break up the model into parts. I am using my low poly model to sculpt in mudbox (after turbosmoothing in max to even it out a bit) so I can use SubD. I know the mesh isnt really perfect for sculpting (varying poly size) but I don't know how to make it into a better sculpting mesh.