How to texture high poly model?

Pimpek5555

How the process of texturing and rendering high poly models look like? I'm talking about realistic high quality rendered images not game models. For example Geralt in The Witcher 3 game box cover. Is this a Zbrush model textured and rendered? But how to texture without UVmapping? Can someone clarify these things for me?

Alex_J

http://lesterbanks.com/2017/03/good-example-texturing-without-uvs/

Pimpek5555

This is how professionals do this?

Alex_J

Article I found from a professional source I've learned from in the past. 

I'm sure some professionals here will chime in.

Obscura

Box covers are often overpainted, and some stuff is hacked in. Its far from raw renders, as its a marketing material.  There are several ways to texture a highpoly mesh, the implementation would normally depend on the nature of the asset. A high poly subdiv hard surface mesh can be just unwrapped on some lower subdiv level. I'm not a character artist myself, but from what I see on the posts by people, those are poly painted usually. Though, the same idea as the hard surface one can be applied here as well, but its probably not a common practice, unless its in some movie short. 

Procedural texturing in with a node graph is one way too, Tor Frick got some nice renders with that. Those can be baked down too, to some unwrapped mesh (normally lower poly, and post subdivided if it was for an offline render)

Eric Chadwick

Agree with the responses above. Except triplanar isnt used for characters much at all. Only for tiled textures.

One way, you sculpt the high-rezs mesh, skip down a few subdivs, add UVs, pop back up top, do a rough polypaint, then export to your 3d paint app of choice, for refinement.

And as Obscura pointed out, there's a lot of paintover work for still shots. Just a lot faster than doing it all in 3d. If the character isn't animating, no need to do it all in 3d.

Some info here that might help
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Character

Burpee

You can also texture it using the same game workflow with low poly + normal map inside of painter, the only big difference between a game asset and a pre rendered asset is the map's resolution and the fact that you use displacement map.
But yeah triplanar can't be used if the asset is moving, but for still image you can do pretty much anything ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykdOVCqSPZc )