which is more important polygonal or sculpting skills?
polycounter lvl 7
It's a question that wouldn't have been asked years ago. Today it seems that most characters go from concept to sculpting then down to a retopologised mesh. This is in contrast to the older days of low poly where it was concept to polygonal model and texturing was all hand painted.
In the game industry today are sculpting skills more important than polygonal modeling skills?
In the game industry today are sculpting skills more important than polygonal modeling skills?
Replies
The most important thing to remember is, how necessary is a sculpted item/object, to the required art style of the game that is being developed.
What drove this question is that since my return to 3d I've seen may tutorials on sculpting. However tutorials on the basics of edgeflow, loops and good lowpoly topology are very sparse. The wiki here is the resource that comes up most often during searches. This led me to believe that polygonal modeling skills were becoming secondary to sculpting skills.
The numbers of tutorials have increased over the past couple of years because of the number of programs during this generation as well the time we are in.
Tutorials were much more rare if you look at the number of them available during the 90's and early 2K's, due the small number of tutorial companies and lack of proper internet sites like Youtube, where streaming with just yet a dream.
With time this changed, so we're getting more, it just happens to be during a time were Sculpting programs are the 'new' thing.
Secondly, there is the issues that sculpting programs have more to offer in terms of new features then traditional apps, for example, Max's biggest features in 2012/2013 was an Egg Spline, when compared with an app like ZB or Mudbox, we got something cool, like Dynamesh or high-end internal rendering systems, or even new age retopology tools that make the job easier for people to get into.
These were stuff that didn't exist in sculpting programs, and many traditional apps still struggle with the features they have, so naturally, a bunch of tutorials will pop up that try and to explain the new stuff that's cool, not the old stuff that is pretty shoddy in 2013.
Lastly, there is the issue of polygons, polygons never change, maybe the tools we use will change and their nature, but not the polygons, so what you learned a few years ago about hand painting and your good old poly-modeling in Max is going to be the same.
There is going to be zero change, you might add some extra polies for higher end games, but once you know the basics, it's up to you to do the work, eyes, nose, ears, all those are you job, we're not going to have a tutorial every time someone makes a new animal and how to create the topology for that VERY specific case, that would mental.
I disagree, you're in an industry that requires you know a specific set of skills within your field, if you're aren't going to bother learning the one and the other which are essentially the evolution of one and the other (like hardsurface and organic) then you have no place in the CGI industry as a whole.
It's more common for a 3D artist not to know how to texture then not know how to model a different element, although even in that case I don't approve of this laziness. No one is going to die if they learn more.
Art style isn't limited to knowing these stuff, style is only limited by your ability to execute it from you resources (and shaders if you plan on working them).
Whats more important, breathing in or breathing out? :P
On the other hand, if you're doing props and hard surface stuff, weapons, vehicles, etc, sculpting is usually much less of a requirement, not to say it isn't necessary or helpful to know though.
Though this can vary heavily depending per project based on art style or any number of factors.