Whole mesh versus bits and pieces?

Target_Renegade

Hi all!

I've been wracking brain over a dilmma I've encountered and was hoping for some advice from you experts.

I have a character mesh that several pieces of armour have been built around. The whole character will be going into Zbrush for detail and normal maps will be generated.

Is it best to work on each separate piece, characters and armour, or is better to import a mesh that consists of the pieces integrated as a whole?

The reason is won't baking a normal map as one mesh create fake lighting? For example an area that becomes shadowed by armour is baked on an normal map whereas in reality all objects are'nt baked, if that makes sense.

Thanks for any help.


[image][/image]

MoP

Seperate pieces are easier to deal with when sculpting or modelling. You can still bake everything as a whole to make sure that all the shadows are accurate when it comes to that stage, just import them all into the same scene.
Just make sure all your mesh parts are aligned properly before sending to ZBrush.

Target_Renegade

Thanks MoP, when I export .obj from 3dMax they're all aligned to how the final mesh will be. What I'm thinking is that I should make separate passes for each normal map then combine these in photoshop. Still getting used to the workflow.

Thanks man.

dejawolf

how do you fix up the seams that show up?

MoP

What seams?
If you split up your highpoly mesh sensibly, there will be no seams.
For example, in the screenshot shown in the first post, you could easily make separate pieces as such:
- The torso (blue bit, it sits on top of the arms/head/legs)
- The legs (not attached to arms or head since the torso covers them)
- Each arm can be a separate object if necessary (or a single one, then mirrored to save time)
- Head
- Shoulderpad

That is much easier to work with than the full model, helps solve any potential "out of memory" errors since you can work on small parts rather than everything at once, and won't lead to any seams since all of the parts fit "inside" one another.

Obviously it wouldn't make any sense to, say, split the leg up at the knee and then work on the leg in two separate parts. That would not only be hard to work on, but would lead to ugly seams too.
You just need to think a bit about how to split it up - in this case, the solution is easy.

I'd probably do it by splitting up the model into separate Subtools in ZBrush, that means you can un-hide them all and view the whole model when you need to, but still be able to work on individual parts in isolation.