His thumb is still too long compared to the rest of his fingers.
I think you should remove the tubes around his arms and shoulder and instead sculpt them in as a part of the body.
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point taken on the thumb but his hands are really big in the concept so Im still working on how to achieve that.
As for the "tubes", theyre meant to be like tree branches or roots, do you mean I should do something thats more like my concept? its a pity if I really need to change it cause Ive spent alot of time integrating them into the sculpt.
Thanks. Mudbox is currently at about 1.5 million polys with everything displayed(my computer cant handle much more about 2.5 is my limit), I dont know if I need to use partial subdivision as more detail might just be overkill and not really noticable. I will need to do something abouth sculpting the armour and stuff though, I might just import lots of seperate pieces. The blades and the way they are attached still needs quite a bit more work too.
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a long patch of cloth connecting to the shorts leading down to the knee/boot area would be interesting.
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what do you mean by this? Its a little hard to imagine as Im not quite sure, I was just going to do cargo trousers bunching up as they go into the knee area and the boots.
I think high poly is just about done. Any crits? What do you think about the new trousers? My computer cant really do much more than this, Im already hiding and unhiding things all the time.
spent all the time I could get this weekend and Ive only got this far with the low poly Im making it using edge extrudes and placing each vert by hand...theres gotta be a faster way! but this does at least result in decent edge flow some of the time.
please crit or comment people, ironbears been some help but Id really appreciate some more input.
In the d'artist series with kevin lanning he explains his workflow in high detail. From what he says, the epic team always recreates low polys from scratch after making the high poly, because they need perfect mesh results.
I don't know if its necessary here, since you will likely not be using it for animating, so what ever is fastest for you is probably what you want.
Personally I rebuild the low poly from scratch every time as you are. But its mainly because with my initial low poly base mesh (for high poly generation), it is always too messed up to use and would take way longer to adjust, then just starting from scratch.
Im by no means as experienced as many of the people on the board, but I hope this helps.
This is interesting stuff yeah I have d'artist character modelling 2 and Im doing what I can without polyboost. I tried exporting low level mudbox meshes but that only works for the body of the character, all the hard surface objects dont have low level versions to work with. I guess I will just have to do things this way for now and see wether I can get a good bake. This is only my second normal mapped character really and the first one was really simple in comparison.
Have you tried importing the hard surface stuff into zbrush and recalculating lower subdivisions?
I have right now and it turns out there are triangles in the mesh somewhere so it cant do that, anyway that usually results in a really messy mesh . Im going to get more work done on mint on thursday till monday when Im not at work.
most of the low poly is done, any crits? any idea if this will bake properly? the pic shows the high poly poking through in places and I intend to refine some shapes more like the belts leading to the medic pouch etc.
oh yeah its only at 5000 tris so Ive got 4000 spare so really crits on how to spend these polys would be great!
You could just unwrap everything piece by piece -> attach it all -> arrange it -> detach -> bake.
yup thats exactly what Ive done now the baking isnt going so well cause I had planned on using xnormal but it doesnt seem to be letting me see both meshes in the 3d viewer
thanks for the tips guys, strangely enough I found that just importing the high poly as 2 seperate meshes instead of one big mesh has avoided all these problems, maybe its something to do with memory management. Anyway now I just need to spend a while adjusting the cage. Do you people know why Im getting bits of the arm appearing on the side of the torso and the inside of the legs appearing on the other leg etc? can the cage fix this or is this a ray distance issue?
That looks good man! It's cool you have so many poly's to spare. I would do what Iron bearxl says and work on the sillohette as much as I can, also; add some really nice chamfers here and there for good transitions from surface type to surface type.
Ive adjusted the cage and then tried a bake and alot of the rays just arent hitting!
what do I have to do to get this to work, Ive tried making my mesh much bigger and much smaller and Ive tried the same on the ray distance, nothing seems to make any difference!
this is sooo frustrating and I cant use max to do the bake cause it crashes when I try loading my high poly pieces.
If you have cages enabled ( sure the "use cage" is checked ) and got strange ray fail probles try to scale up a bit the meshes. Due to floating point numerical precision, meshes with radius near [2.0,6.0] can be conflictive. Try to keep the radius in range [90,1000] always.
And remember to do a "Freeze transformation" in Maya or Reset XForm in 3dsmax before exporting... and don't use the 3dsmax OBJ exporter... is pretty bugged.
If you have cages enabled ( sure the "use cage" is checked ) and got strange ray fail probles try to scale up a bit the meshes. Due to floating point numerical precision, meshes with radius near [2.0,6.0] can be conflictive. Try to keep the radius in range [90,1000] always.
And remember to do a "Freeze transformation" in Maya or Reset XForm in 3dsmax before exporting... and don't use the 3dsmax OBJ exporter... is pretty bugged.
Thanks for the reply, Im not sure what reset xform does but I can only do that on my low poly mesh because my high poly doesnt import into max, it just crashes. Also I will try and get a better obj exporter...I will look for one now then.
you don´t have to reset xform the high.. and if you bake the normals in xnormal use the xnormal sbm exporter out of 3dmax
sbm´s load ... 10times or so faster than obj´s, and they have no normal-bugs
thanks rollin, Im exporting the high poly straight from mudbox so I have to export as obj, the low I can use an sbm. I will do more experimenting later but at the moment now that Ive re-exported the low poly it just seems to render nothing at all on the bake now...sooo Im beginning to wonder If I can finish this in time.
any idea how to stop getting backface hits in xnormal?
this is a different example to my character but I think it may be the same problem, I need to sort this out really soon or dom war just will not happen for me
I had that issue too - I'd been working with double sided faces in Silo and some were flipped. It was an easy fix on both the low and high poly objects though.
Ok Ive done some investigating and exported my mesh again but Im still getting similar results. I cant believe i'm still fighting to get the normal map, its been almost a week and I cant seem to get xnormal to just give me a normal map.
Usecage is on, the cage is fairly good, the mesh is big and the viewer is working, Ive tried making it 100xbigger and making it 100xsmaller, nothing makes any difference. discard back face hits is not ticked so you should be able to see if there were any backface hits...so where are the rays going!?
I bet you need to set any option to export the OBj with the correct face winding order.. in ZBrush is something like FlipX/FlipY. xNormal expects faces as front=CCW order, exactly as was strictly defined in the OBJ file format from Maya... that's why you were seeing the normals green... because rays are discarding opposite ones... You can try to uncheck the "Discard backface hits" options... but the way to solve that is probably to touch some option in the Mudbox OBJ exporter.
Also try to set the "smooth normals" option... that will autocalculate the normals for you.
Also notice to use the cage you need to save it in a SBM or to use an external cage file... If you are using OBJs only(without external cages) the "use cage" will do nothing.
Can you show us the cage+lowpoly+highpoly ( to see if it's well set covering completely the highpoly ) and also UV-layout and your hi/low poly slot settings pls?
that's why you were seeing the normals green... because rays are discarding opposite ones... You can try to uncheck the "Discard backface hits" options... but the way to solve that is probably to touch some option in the Mudbox OBJ exporter.
The normal map pictured above was generated with discard backface hits unchecked...so its not hitting the backfaces or the frontfaces? Ive been looking in mudbox and all they give you is the option to export to obj thats all I cant find, no options to do with the format.
ok as faar as i know you have to set the cage a bit bigger than it would seem
Im just checking but I think you might have nailed the problem with that statement right there, the cage was so close to the mesh that xnormal wasnt even recognising the distance somehow?
a week of confusion and I just had to enlarge the cage a bit more than I would have expected.
I always thought that the closer you approximated to the low poly the better the cage would output the normal map? but I found that just wasnt the way it worked for this mesh.
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I removed the shoulder armour and added an armour pad to the leg cause it looked far too vulnerable. Please Crit!!
His thumb is still too long compared to the rest of his fingers.
I think you should remove the tubes around his arms and shoulder and instead sculpt them in as a part of the body.
His thumb is still too long compared to the rest of his fingers.
I think you should remove the tubes around his arms and shoulder and instead sculpt them in as a part of the body.
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point taken on the thumb but his hands are really big in the concept so Im still working on how to achieve that.
As for the "tubes", theyre meant to be like tree branches or roots, do you mean I should do something thats more like my concept? its a pity if I really need to change it cause Ive spent alot of time integrating them into the sculpt.
A good way to fix his hands is to put a sphere in his hand to grip on to.
Nice addition to the hard surface bits!
How is mudbox handling the polycount so far, are you isolating areas and using partial subdivision yet?
so many people seem to dislike them, I could transform them into some cargo trousers feeding into the boots or something?
If it's a cargo material then it would probably bunch up around the knee.
a long patch of cloth connecting to the shorts leading down to the knee/boot area would be interesting.
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what do you mean by this? Its a little hard to imagine as Im not quite sure, I was just going to do cargo trousers bunching up as they go into the knee area and the boots.
Can you post some close-ups of the front/back of head, and the arm?
Have you thought about adding some twigs/leaves on him?
please crit or comment people, ironbears been some help but Id really appreciate some more input.
if i retop it would take me 10 times as long
I don't know if its necessary here, since you will likely not be using it for animating, so what ever is fastest for you is probably what you want.
Personally I rebuild the low poly from scratch every time as you are. But its mainly because with my initial low poly base mesh (for high poly generation), it is always too messed up to use and would take way longer to adjust, then just starting from scratch.
Im by no means as experienced as many of the people on the board, but I hope this helps.
For my head, I took the second lowest level from zbrush and removed loops to knock out most of the polygons, then got down to some target welding.
I have right now and it turns out there are triangles in the mesh somewhere so it cant do that, anyway that usually results in a really messy mesh
oh yeah its only at 5000 tris so Ive got 4000 spare
if you post a wire view it would be easier to crit, but I would spend the rest of the polys on the silhouette.
does anyone who uses 3ds max 8 or 9 know how to easily put multiple objects on to one uvmap layout?
I cant seem to find a way other than either guessing or outputting on to an image from each uvmap.
EDIT: ok I found a thread here discussing it and it seems you just have to attach everything
yup thats exactly what Ive done now
than i check (use cage) in the lowpoly-section
and than i bake the maps.. so no need to use the viewer.. in fact i don´t use the viewer at all
what do I have to do to get this to work, Ive tried making my mesh much bigger and much smaller and Ive tried the same on the ray distance, nothing seems to make any difference!
this is sooo frustrating and I cant use max to do the bake cause it crashes when I try loading my high poly pieces.
Im doing the cage and bake in xnormal, max cant cope and crashes alot. still no joy after much trial and error.
can´t you export a mid-subd from zbrush into max for cage-building?
edit: you can put an optimize modifier on the mid-subd model and it will work even more fluent, while building the cage
And remember to do a "Freeze transformation" in Maya or Reset XForm in 3dsmax before exporting... and don't use the 3dsmax OBJ exporter... is pretty bugged.
Thanks for the reply, Im not sure what reset xform does but I can only do that on my low poly mesh because my high poly doesnt import into max, it just crashes. Also I will try and get a better obj exporter...I will look for one now then.
sbm´s load ... 10times or so faster than obj´s, and they have no normal-bugs
thanks rollin, Im exporting the high poly straight from mudbox so I have to export as obj, the low I can use an sbm. I will do more experimenting later but at the moment now that Ive re-exported the low poly it just seems to render nothing at all on the bake now...sooo Im beginning to wonder If I can finish this in time.
this is a different example to my character but I think it may be the same problem, I need to sort this out really soon or dom war just will not happen for me
LOL yes Im gonna see if this is the case for my character too later when Im home.
Usecage is on, the cage is fairly good, the mesh is big and the viewer is working, Ive tried making it 100xbigger and making it 100xsmaller, nothing makes any difference. discard back face hits is not ticked so you should be able to see if there were any backface hits...so where are the rays going!?
Also try to set the "smooth normals" option... that will autocalculate the normals for you.
Also notice to use the cage you need to save it in a SBM or to use an external cage file... If you are using OBJs only(without external cages) the "use cage" will do nothing.
Can you show us the cage+lowpoly+highpoly ( to see if it's well set covering completely the highpoly ) and also UV-layout and your hi/low poly slot settings pls?
The normal map pictured above was generated with discard backface hits unchecked...so its not hitting the backfaces or the frontfaces? Ive been looking in mudbox and all they give you is the option to export to obj thats all I cant find, no options to do with the format.
i have not enabled the ao thing on the high
i have enabled the smooth-normal on the low and disabled the bla-override
enabled discard backface hits and enabled "closest hit if ray fails"
i´v set the cage in max and exportet as sbm and some parts as obj (bc i can´t import them into max)
i´v rendered several passes for all the objects and parts and fixed some holes in ps
that was my way
Im just checking but I think you might have nailed the problem with that statement right there, the cage was so close to the mesh that xnormal wasnt even recognising the distance somehow?
I always thought that the closer you approximated to the low poly the better the cage would output the normal map? but I found that just wasnt the way it worked for this mesh.
thanks Rollin!