Lowpoly from kitbashed mesh?
interpolator
Hello guys, I just found out about kitbashing assets, and I have a question I cannot find an answer to. Say I have all these pipes and assets that i put together and make a robot. How do you make this into a lowpoly? Because baking all these details into a bigger shape doesnt sound like its gonna work.. do you make each individual piece a lowpoly and just bake some screws?
Replies
Do you bake and make most of these pieces into low poly?
Kit-bashing is great for mashing ideas together quickly. Kit-bashing is not great if you are intending to create a real-time production asset. The whole idea of KB is that you don't need to plan out a workflow in advance, and what modeling methods to use, or worry about topology or vert count or unwrapping. Unless you really know what you're doing workflow-wise I don't recommend it as an efficient or viable option for a complex hard-surface production asset.
But there's no reason why you couldn't make a production ready kit of unwrapped parts set up for a low/high bake workflow. Almost like a modular kit of parts that could be used on many different machines/mechs/etc. But, this will still take time up front. And planning.
With concept kit-bashing arbitrary parts are just mashed together for a pleasing astetic with little or no regard for production. Different shapes and forms can be just jammed together to create new forms that might not have been planned. 'Happy accidents' as it's known.
But, go ahead. Try it out. Experiment. If it works and saves time, great. If not, still great as you've learned from it and have a built a custom kit. You have nothing to lose either way.
Poly reduction would be your only easy way out, but you're still going to do work fixing the result. You could potentially boolean everything together and retop from that as a small shortcut. I'm with musashidan here about the workflow comments, but there's nothing wrong with trying it out and seeing what works for you.