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Difference in Games to VFX workflows?

3D4Eva
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3D4Eva polycounter lvl 4
I'm come from a video game background and I'm looking into VFX but I'm struggling to understand a few things.

In games we always convert our meshes to tris once they're ready for baking, and we use that same version going forward in any game engine to maintain consistency otherwise our normal maps can look off if the mesh is converted to tris differently between applications, and the baker.

Even animation work is done as per the normal way (quads), then we convert to tris once done as per the above.

With VFX I'm seeing that people work in all quads for the most part, and even when baking they wont convert to tris because the claim is their deformations will suffer. I'm trying to understand why this is? Is it because they use displacement maps instead of normal maps so converting to tris to bake really isn't required? Do VFX artists even use normal maps without converting to tris prior to baking as a normal workflow? I'm talked with a few that do...

Thanks for any help understanding this.

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  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    Yes nearly everything is displaced in FX and if not its subdivided. 
    And its no problem if you have "some" triangles in your lvl0 mesh. Animation meshes are really dens these days. 
  • 3D4Eva
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    3D4Eva polycounter lvl 4
    oglu said:
    Yes nearly everything is displaced in FX and if not its subdivided. 
    And its no problem if you have "some" triangles in your lvl0 mesh. Animation meshes are really dens these days. 
    Thank you. So I guess normal maps are not common.

    How come in VFX people don't have to worry about quad meshes looking different from application to application? One of the reasons in games we use a tri mesh between our applications as needed.

    Do quads actually deform better than tris if the conversion to tris is done after all the animation work?
  • Obscura
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    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    Normal maps are actually used in films too but only for fine details. 

    About the quads - They still get triangulated at render time, but on such high poly meshes, they get triangulated better and the "errors" are not visible. While they can show up visibly on low poly meshes. Normal maps and triangulation is also closely related in game assets.
  • 3D4Eva
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    3D4Eva polycounter lvl 4
    Obscura said:
    Normal maps are actually used in films too but only for fine details. 

    About the quads - They still get triangulated at render time, but on such high poly meshes, they get triangulated better and the "errors" are not visible. While they can show up visibly on low poly meshes. Normal maps and triangulation is also closely related in game assets.
    That would make sense. With a very low poly mesh certain cuts will throw off the shading at a noticeable level.

    In VFX how low do your low polys go for rigging? I assume you're not using high polys to animate with? Do you go as low as those in game development, or is it more of a medium poly mesh?
  • sprunghunt
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    sprunghunt polycounter
    3D4Eva said:
    Obscura said:
    Normal maps are actually used in films too but only for fine details. 

    About the quads - They still get triangulated at render time, but on such high poly meshes, they get triangulated better and the "errors" are not visible. While they can show up visibly on low poly meshes. Normal maps and triangulation is also closely related in game assets.
    That would make sense. With a very low poly mesh certain cuts will throw off the shading at a noticeable level.

    In VFX how low do your low polys go for rigging? I assume you're not using high polys to animate with? Do you go as low as those in game development, or is it more of a medium poly mesh?
    A lot of the time VFX riggers will create a very low poly mesh stand in that the animators use that's not even vertex deformed. 

    here's an example of a stand in model :
    https://youtu.be/ATWBg6QfiBk?t=45
  • 3D4Eva
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    3D4Eva polycounter lvl 4
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