female zombie game character

mucsiattila

Hi! My name is Attila. I want to create a female zombie character for HL2 source. It may has 4000 triangles, becouse there will be a lot of them on screen.

#1 - First I thought to crearte the basic mesh in max with its 4k tris (~2k quad), put it into ZBrush for sculpting a high res version to create maps, than lower subdiv level to basics, and triangulate to finish it.

#2 - Than I asked some people, who suggested me to make a high res character, and with the help of it build an other low res triangulated one, and bake textures, like this one:
http://vimeo.com/5734031

#3 - This looks hard for me, so I was thinking on building a base, detailing in ZB, and lower the res with decimation master plugin.

So wich way is better/best?
Will be max and ZB ok for this work?

please do advice...

thx in advance

Attila


ps: I'll post some pics ASAP

pps: here is the image, where you can se the "pre" stage with 3328 triangles

Steve Schulze

Decimation master won't be any use for anything you need to animate.

Your best options are either:
Make a base mesh - a simple model made up of relatively consistently shaped and sized quads in max and take that into ZBrush. It won't need to be 4000 polys. Just enough to get the structure of the model down so you can start sculpting. Once you've got your high res, you retopo it either inside ZBrush or in Topogun or Max. I prefer the first option myself.

Alternatively, you can make you base mesh inside ZBrush using ZSpheres and Zsketching. Then once again sculpt up your mesh and retopo.

Either way would work perfectly well, it just depends whether you're happier making your base in Max or ZBrush.

oobersli

maybe you should try to do it each way and then after your done you can evaluate what went wrong with each method and why. You'll learn a lot more from mistakes than being told what to do.

MRico

Have you seen what the decimation master does?

It would probably only be good for static meshes that aren't going to be animated.

Anyways here's how I do it...

Base mesh -> Zbrush -> final low poly off of zbrush model.

That works the best because you can give your characters loops where you want/need them in the end.

If you're scared and try to find one-button solutions you're never going to learn anything.

cryrid

You'll learn a lot more from mistakes than being told what to do.

A burnt hand may teach best, but at the same time a lot of people can get the good idea not to stick their hand on a burner in the first place.

#1 - First I thought to crearte the basic mesh in max with its 4k tris (~2k quad), put it into ZBrush for sculpting a high res version to create maps, than lower subdiv level to basics, and triangulate to finish it.

Sometimes this works out decently. The only thing is that sculpting programs handle better with quads (evenly spaced if possible), where as the final game mesh usually only needs to define the form/silhouette, while providing the loops for better deformation during animation (which can sometimes benefit from triangles).

#3 - This looks hard for me, so I was thinking on building a base, detailing in ZB, and lower the res with decimation master plugin

As Jackablade said, decimation master wont work too well for things that need to be animated, especially characters. His advice is my preferred way to go - you can sculpt however you need to, and retopologizing after is easy enough.