Workflow for Character in Movies.

The_Silent_One

Hi all,

I've been busy sculpting Kid Buu (Dragon Ball Z) in Zbrush with the goal of creating a film ready model. I am unsure as to what the workflow would be for a film character.
I understand that for films the polycount can be pretty high and some people have mentioned that you don't need to retop to create a low poly. How would I unwrap such a high poly model though? 

Thanking you in advance.

Scruples

You unwrap it the same way you would a lowpoly, only you don't mirror UV's and texture space is slightly less valuable.
Because it's for film you could try using Ptex, which comes it's own caveats but would skip the unwrapping process entirely, if you have 3dcoat I'd give it a shot. edit: oh and make sure Ptex is actually supported by your renderer first.

The_Silent_One

So would you avoid retop and just unwrap the high poly? If so I've had troubles with unwrapping high poly in max because it always crashes.

Scruples

As long as the edges flow in a logical way that is manageable and enough for the needed deformations I wouldn't retopo. Not sure what to say about the crashes, did you check for non-manifold geometry?

The_Silent_One

Alright thanks for your help. 

AtticusMars

Wouldn't you want to use a lower res mesh in sub-d with a displacement map? How "high poly" is your mesh? If you can't even unwrap it, good luck trying to animate it... I'm not familiar with film but I'm having trouble seeing the benefit of trying to work with a dense mesh.

Scruples

Good point, I forgot to ask, we had someone in school doing a 900k quad organic and while it did slow the computer down to a crawl he did manage to skin, unwrap and animate it for his feature, so I would consider that the practical limit for a single bipedal humanoid for now. (for reference 150k quads is more along the norm).

musashidan

Unwrapping is generally across multiple udim tiles. These days a hero character might commonly have 100+8k tiles. So squeezing pixels out of 0-1 isn't relevant.

Displacement(and other maps) maps are often painted to the finished organised mesh in Mari.(as opposed to derived from sculpted detail.) and Render time subdivisision used.

Topo is dense in comparison to a game character but certainly not anywhere near a sculpt mesh density. Topo is built to accommodate complex rigging systems.

Retopo is unnecessary as the organised mesh is the final asset topo.

Shading and the use of many, many procedural/painted maps and masks driving multi-layered blended shaders is a huge part of the workflow.

Of course this is dependent on the pipeline.

Gollum topo is still often used as an example of vfx topo.

oglu

there are some good vids from weta you should take a look...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r45e5Xky35k