question regarding 3D character art pipeline

suwhan

Hello, everyone,

I have a quick requestion regarding 3D character art pipelines (for games). 
I have a full figure (minus the details such as hair, skin, etc.) for retopo.
The plan is to retopo and add fibermesh hairs, xyz texturing, and final detail sculpting.
I don't want to put in a lot of time with the retopo and find out I should have done the details first.
Is my plan correct? Or should I do the retopo after the detailing?


thanks in advance!

Burpee

You can do the retopo, then the detailing, as long as your silouette doesn't change that much. Since you'll bake your details on your normal map you can do anything you want with your highpoly.
Cheers!

Octo

For a highpoly it's certainly more efficient to retopo before going into pore detail.
The small details won't affect the topology and you wouldn't have to reproject pores and such.
Of course nowadays I'd argue it's a waste making pores in zbrush and just do it in substance painter at the texturing stage, as it's lighter on the pipeline and less destructive.

Alex_J

If this is your first time going through this pipeline, plan on making some mistake and needing to redo tedious things over again. Maybe several times, if you are a slow dolt like me. 

But there is a few habits that can save you some headache, and some tools to help clean up messes as well. 

1. Save out milestones of your project and organize into easy to find, easy to read file hierarchies. Don't only save what you think you will need, save all the standard formats you use. So say you finish the hi-poly, and the next part of the workflow is uncertain. Go ahead and save a ztool, save a zproject, save an fbx or obj, and save a Maya scene or whatever program scene you are using. This gives you flexibility down the road, should you need it. Naming convention could be "myCharacter_hiPoly_01."    01 is denoting first version. If you later make some changes, save them on a second version -- again because you don't know wha thte future is going to hold.

What you don't want is a million fbx files with weird names that, a month from now, you can't make any sense of and you got to open them up one at a time to find what you need. This type of careful organization may seem redundant and laborious, but if you are anything like me it may end up saving you a lot of headache down the road when you are in the process or figuring out new workflows.

2. subtool>project, and layers are your good friend. If you aren't really familiar with these tools in zbrush, make sure to check out the documentation and some youtube tutorials.

3. as mentioned, experiment with doing skin details in your texturing app versus zbrush, and see if that doesn't work out better for you.

suwhan

Thanks, everyone! All your replies were helpful!