How do you guys make your characters?
polycounter lvl 12
I'm into enviro and prop modeling, but getting into learning characters now at uni.
Do you guys always start with a base mesh made in Maya or max, etc., then bring that into a sculpting program and make the high poly?
I've heard a lot of people just make the high poly first. Do you guys who do that bring anything from maya or max for use into the sculpting program, or just make it all inside there, then trim it down for the low poly version?
Do you guys always start with a base mesh made in Maya or max, etc., then bring that into a sculpting program and make the high poly?
I've heard a lot of people just make the high poly first. Do you guys who do that bring anything from maya or max for use into the sculpting program, or just make it all inside there, then trim it down for the low poly version?
Replies
- The hardware, console, PC, Hand held?
- How close the camera gets 3rd person, RTS, FPS? Sit down and interview the character (IE lots of facial dialog) or blow them away the second they're in range? Is the same model going to be used for cinematics?
- what kind of character is this, background, main character, boss, henchmen, throw away enemy?
- How much time do you have per character?
In general for the games I work on (standard humans in mystery adventure games) we make a low poly almost fully, do some light sculpting, bake and refine the textures. We mostly do this because we have a good low poly-ish mesh that is skinning friendly and the details we add in don't change the overall model that much. So its faster than recreating the low poly every time and trying to remember all the little nuances that make it easy to skin/deform.
If we where doing wholly unique character like aliens or animals, they would probably do a quick base mesh either with Zspheres or a super rough base mesh in Max. The sculpt a high, make a low, bake and refine.
sculptris is another awesome tool for fleshing out concepts pretty quickly. it's a free app that's buggy as hell and in alpha stage, but still responsible for some cool monsters of mine. you might want to look into it
if someone gives you a specific character to make from concept art or reference images, i'd set up reference planes and model it in modo/silo/xsi/blender/maya/max before sculpting it.
if you're really comfortable with what the end product is going to be right off the bat, you can just model the low poly right away (if you have zbrush or a good computer). the reason why it doesn't really matter what you sculpt on these days is simply because you can make maps from HD geometry since zbrush 3.5, so your topology for sculpting is really pretty irrelevant. if you don't have zbrush, but your computer can subdivide to like 20 millionish anyway, then i think you'll survive without making a sculpting cage.
regardless of how you start, if you want to add clothes or something afterward, you can just retopo your model or decimate it, load it in external 3d app (maya etc...) and add or change whatever you want.
For this class we have to make the low poly in Maya, then bring that into Mudbox and sculpt all the details in. We've got a 10k tri budget.
RALUSEK, you say Zbrush lets you make maps from HD geometry now. What do you mean by these maps? Do you mean you can sculpt an entire character then Zbrush can generate the UVs for you? Also what do you mean at the end when you say decimate it?
I've got the two training kits for Zbrush that Eat3d released, so I'm gonna go through and learn Zbrush as well as Mudbox.
Decimation Master optimizes your high poly sculpt while preserving as much detail as it can. It's nice if you plan to export your high poly and bake maps in another app like xNormal, Max or Maya.
You should also check out GoZ or GoMax they allow you to import and export from your app of choice with the click of a button. If you need to do something you can only do in Maya or Max, export do it and re import.