Modeling and Texturing pipeline for VFX assets

izzir

Hi guys,

I've been working in the gaming industry for quite a while and I would like to discover a bit more the VFX / movie world. I looked for tutorials and stuff but I still have a few questions.

What would be a classic pipleine for a high-quality assets ? 
Do you still use a Low-poly and High poly mesh and then use a normal map ?
When rendering in Maya, do you render with subdiv preview on or do you bake the smoothing and then Unwrap. 

Thanks,
izzir

 

musashidan

Displacement maps are used in place of normal maps (although they might often  be used for fine detail baked from the 2 higest sub-d levels, with details like nurnies being geo) VFX texture artists paint a lot of the disp map details straight onto the animation topology using high-res scans.

A lot of hard surface assets are pure polygon modeling with dense topology and render-time subdivision. 

The modeling workflow isn't all that different considering where real-time is at these days. The biggest difference lies in the texturing/shading work where(depending on the asset, of course) 100's of masks might be used in a multi-layered/blended shader. Procedurals are used a lot, and uvs are spread out across 50+ 8K udims, for example.

2bytes

Whats often overlooked is the modelling for invisible effects, which is the grunt work on most productions. This is modeling low poly assets for matte paintings and 2.5d conversions of original footage and projecting it onto the geometry.

musashidan

2bytes said:

Whats often overlooked is the modelling for invisible effects, which is the grunt work on most productions. This is modeling low poly assets for matte paintings and 2.5d conversions of original footage and projecting it onto the geometry.

Good point but, to quote OP  "What would be a classic pipleine for a high-quality assets ? "