Mixing triple edges technique with creased edges

jozin

Hi guys, there  another question has been arose: it's possible (legal) to mix between manual creasing (triple edges technique) and mandatory creasing (saying like that one in zbrush), its not prohibited? in movie productionpipeline ? thank you in advance

Obscura

Nothing has fully sharp edges in real life. 

Edit - I'm not much of a zbrush pro, and I assumed that it would give fully sharp edge but after a bit of image googling, it seems like it can give smooth result. But then my question is, if you bake this into the mesh, then whats the difference? Nothing? And normally you wouldn't want to bake subdiv in. That should be applied at render time.

jozin

Obscura said:

Nothing has fully sharp edges in real life. 

Edit - I'm not much of a zbrush pro, and I assumed that it would give fully sharp edge but after a bit of image googling, it seems like it can give smooth result. But then my question is, if you bake this into the mesh, then whats the difference? Nothing? And normally you wouldn't want to bake subdiv in. That should be applied at render time.

The question was about standards in films industry,  and it not seems zbrush supports for opensubdiv creasing (not sure through), as far as I know, subd is applied dynamically at rendering stage, so zbrush creasing must be supported by renderer, whether it is maya or any other software like unreal engine

But when baking to lowpoly I think this should work, as a bonus we've got the same mesh for high and low poly

Obscura

I wouldn't think many renderers supports them if any, but someone more experienced with the topic should clarify this. I haven't seen such a workflow where I work, or anywhere to be honest. I would assume that this info is lost at the moment you export the mesh back to maya or whatever dcc. So maybe the best is, to do a test. But I would be surprised if fbx or obj could carry this info over.

cjw

Hey jozin,

the studio I'm working at uses both creased edges and support loops, though the majority of assets are done with support loops and just a few with additional creasing. 

Creases carry over without problems from zbrush to maya via fbx. In maya they will usually have a value of 10 (I'm on the receiving end here so not sure if the value can be set in zbrush) but you can easily create a crease set automatically with the crease set editor and change the values there.

Further in the pipeline alembic writes creases as well and with usd I think this should be no problem at all (though I have no real hands on experience with that)

So yes, mixing both techniques is totally fine especially because I don't think you can get away with using only creases on all your assets.

Maybe you have seen it already but this video has a few good examples where to use creases (the part with the playground model from toy story 3)

https://vimeo.com/70600180

Best,

cjw