Aqua Racing Character, tips greatly appreciated

nrek

So this is an aquatic racing character I have started in hopes of getting into UT3 eventually. This is my first real character to be made with game specs in mind, so im running into snags here and there. I have my three levels of detail mostly completed and unwrapped, I have a high poly subd model which I broke into chunks and further detailed in Z Brush. So now im ready to generate some normals and AO maps for my lower res chars but my mesh chunks are coming out of Z brush with well over 4-6 million polys. With these high poly Z Brush exports I can’t manage to get them into max without it blowing up. So if anyone has some tips or advice on how I should proceed it would be greatly appreciated.

Zephir62

I'd snag a copy of Mudbox, where you can directly bake the high poly onto the low-poly mesh within the program - it can handle way higher polycounts than 3DS Max. Otherwise, I've run into the same problems with Max and I have no clue how to help you.

Ruz

you could try it with xnormal?

Also why are each of the chunks 4- 6 million polys?.
That seems a tad high to me for the amount of detail stuff you have going on

FAT_CAP

You can bake normal maps directly to a low-polygon model inside ZBrush with the ZMapper plugin - this comes as standard with versions 3 and above as far as I remember - no need to download Mudbox and completely start your high poly model from scratch either!

Michael Knubben

Aww Fatcap, don't ruin Zephir's idiotic suggestion!

I'm really liking the concept, but the sculpt seem to be of a much lesser quality. Especially the hair is a real letdown, which is a shame, since this has got real potential. Maybe you could give the sculpt another go-over before you get to the baking?
Looking forward to seeing the results!

Zephir62

MightyPea wrote: »

Aww Fatcap, don't ruin Zephir's idiotic suggestion!

screw you I don't even use ZBrush :P I figured there was a function in ZBrush and actually I made a google search just in case before making that post without any results..

Meanie! I hate you!!!

Michael Knubben

Hey! Hate Fatcap, he's the real meanie!

FAT_CAP

See what I've gone and started!

There's a step by step guide on how to use the ZMAPPER plugin in the ZBRUSH practical manual which can be found here: http://www.zbrush.info/docs/index.php/Downloads. It's pretty thorough (at least it was for version 2) and deals with all of the problems that using ZMAPPER on two different meshes with different topologies can bring up (such as the scaling and/ or alignment issues). Hope this helps.

nrek

Hey everyone thank you so much for the replys. I had to get my two lower res LODs "finished" for class this morning so unfortunately they are a bit rushed. Ruz I did give xnormal a try after you mentioned it, it realy is a pretty awesome program. But I kept getting werid seams in the normal map (pic below) I dont know if I had settings wrong or what, either way I just went back to max : /. FAT_CAP, I have used Zmapper once before with a model that I ended up sculpting off my low poly. But with this one since I had a higer res already made up as my base for sculpting I ran into trouble. I read through that zbrush doc you linked me to, I assume the phone tutorial was what you were talking about? I gave it a try but I couldnt get my low res models ztool to actually load into the sub lvl 1 slot of my higher res sculpt. MightyPea, I took your advice and resculpted the head. I think the second go around came out slightly better, im still not too confident about the hair though. So thanks again guys. I plan to get a solid workflow going before I move onto my 4,500 poly model. And when I do start it im going rescultp the char and this time actually sculpt in the detail lines in the suit rather than painting them onto the normal map. I also want to get the helmet modeled and try to take some age off of the characters looks. But anyway here is what I came up with for the first go around.






Xnormal problems

nrek

Well I finally finished this guy up, it was a great learning exercise and I look forward to a hopefully smoother second character : P . If you guys notice anything that I should have done differently please let me know so I can make sure to not do it again. He came out to be 4,502 tris, not including the base, tree, and extras.

Aldo

I really like your pedestal. Cool tree and crab.

One thing I would advise would to be to take now what type of details transfers over in normal maps and what get lost, because you don't need things that are 4-5 million polys because most of that detail gets lost unless you use a huge map. (as far as I know). So for example, you don't seem to really used the detail from the hair sculpt at all...so it was kind of a waste to sculpt all of it. In fact, it seems like most of the details from your sculpts were lost...? so..just take note of that..it's all stuff that comes the more you figure out your workflow.

ElysiumGX

The pedestal is cool. I like it.

The lighting on your character is horrible. Set it up so that he looks like he's outdoors. Fill in those harsh shadows.

nrek

Thanks for the comments guys, I will make sure to relight it if I decide to use in my portfolio or anything. And Aldo your right I wasted a ton of time sculpting and re sculpting, when in the end I just ran the hair from the diffuse through crazy bump to get the details which I then overlaid on a much rougher pass of normals from the high poly head.