How to approach inorganic+organic char modeling?

soulstice

Hi guys, I'm basically in the concept phase right now and just about to finish of and start modeling a character (futuristic type marine) whos going to have alot of hardsurfaces for his armor. I wanted to try to include Zbrush in this workflow for practice, however I'm not sure how to approach the armor. Is it recommended to sub-d model armors and stuff in you're own 3d ap and then approach stuff like the head+arms in zbrush? I've included a drawing of my concept as an example.

Any tips on how I can tackle a high poly of this model for normal mapping would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for looking!

Rhinokey

well it depends, if you want to be super precise on the armor parts then you would need to do it regular sub d. but in experiments i've done, you can get hard surfaces fine enough inside a sculpt program for most normal map situations,, its just a bit trickier, and limited, practice and see what you get.

East

With some practice you can get away with using mostly ZBrush for modeling hard surface such as armour. What you get should work well for a normal map for games.

I just started working on something similar myself, a space marine type in ZBrush. I don't particularly enjoy traditional modeling, so I work mainly by sculpting and could probably throw a few pointers your way, if you need/want to.

Nice concept, btw Just not too sure about his armoured briefs. But then again, with all the female character designs with chainmail bras and strings.. why not?

aniceto

another way:
human base mesh -> 2 or 3 level subdiv sculpt of naked human(keep it fairly simple)
sculpt the armor on a seperate layer so you can turn it on and off to check how the volume is working. Dont worry about going into too much detail, this is just meant to be indicative.

export that sculpt and recreate the armor SubD style using the zbrush sculpt as a base to snap to.

next step is to take your sculpted mesh and delete any faces that you've remodelled so you can take the organic bits to a higher level in zbrush.


initial zbrush sketch
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d3/shika01/eye%20candy/b233d740.jpg

subD remodelling
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d3/shika01/eye%20candy/b7b17c53-1.jpg

I find this process wayyy faster for getting nice machine-like hard surfaces...at least in instances where the hard surfaces are pseudo-organic

soulstice

Hey guys, thanks alot for the tips! With all the Zbrush suggestions, I think I might take that route and see how things turn out.

Rhino: Thanks for the tip, with what you said I think I'll try to see what I can get done in Zbrush, and if that fails then I'll move it over to 3DSmax for subd.

East: I love you're sculpting! I saw another character you did on Gameartisans which kicked ass and I was really suprised when you said it was all done in Zbrush! Ya the armored briefs is kinda weird, I will change that up for sure in the final model. lol

Aniceto: Thanks for that tip, I think this will really help if my armor doesn't turn out as refine as I would like it to be from sculpting in Zbrush. Never thought of that approach until you mentioned. I think you're approach makes sense and I can test out how Zbrush will work for me and still have something to fall back to.

spitty

aniceto,

what program do you use to recreate the zbrush model as a subD model? does 3dsmax have good tools for doing this, or should i buy something like polyboost?

aniceto

I'm using max+polyboost till i find something better