Alien WIP + Sculpting on a Decimated Model

ralusek

Alright, so I did a little playing around with Sculptris, and was having a pretty decent time sculpting on a triangulated mesh. I noticed that Zbrush's Unified Skins were adding some triangles as well, and they were really not noticable to sculpt with. That led me to trying this, which is sculpting on a decimated mesh.

i'll explain in following post

[edit]: very WIP by the way. not even the large forms are set in stone atm, and fortunately nothing has to be using this workflow. the most "WiP" portion atm is the ribbed back. i kind of just started pulling and pushing it around and decided to post as is for feedback while i finish

ralusek

so i was getting sick of making unified skins, projecting, and getting bad results more often than not. since sculpting in sculptris has served as a refreshing experience, i wanted a way to get that auto tesselation in zbrush. my solution has pretty much been to do whatever i want to a model, decimate it to about 50k, and divide again. decimation master creates way more relevant level of detail than sculptris, and flows perfectly to the model with even detail.

once i started getting more detail in, i just tried decimating to 50k polygons again, dividing and projecting. the projecting worked perfectly the first time since the decimated mesh was so close to the previous model. (the reason i'm going to 50k and projecting instead of just decimating to a higher polygon count is only because i like to work with lower polycount when doing changes to large forms. personal choice).

another benefit to this is that i was able to locally subdivide using masking and it really didn't change anything since i just keep decimating with the detail being picked up anyway. so say i'm doing something on the face and want more detail around the eye, i just mask it off, invert mask, and subdivide. problem solved, detail maintained next time i decimate.

TLDR: i started this model from a sphere, just pulled using Move brush, and decimated when needed. works better than sculptris and is entirely within zbrush

catstyle

very interesting and cunning approach, will try that sometime

ralusek

thanks. something else to note is that this has certain limitations. the driving concept behind it is that a solid level of detail is achievable, but only through subdividing enough that the tesselation doesn't even matter. that being said, you do need a decent computer to do this method to your final level of detail.

if you just want to use it to make concepts like sculptris though, then you don't need a decent pc at all.

and something that obviously helps alot would be using different subtools to get way higher polycounts. i, for instance, have the majority of the back shell on that alien as separate subtool at around 1 million polygons, and the main body at 4 million. not very high, but would be uncomfortable to work with if i was working on my laptop. my solution would be to just add the legs/arms as subtools and drop each individual polycount significantly.

n88tr

I know it's a WIP but how would it move? By hovering or something? Also I think it's way too uniform, makes it look fake or something.

ralusek

it's head/back/tail is also an anchor point/"leg." it's arms are also legs. it moves like a crab or a spider would atm, and i'm currently looking at maybe adding a few joints to make it able to roll like a droideka. not sure about that though.

KyleJensen

ralusek wrote: »

it's head/back/tail is also an anchor point/"leg." it's arms are also legs. it moves like a crab or a spider would atm, and i'm currently looking at maybe adding a few joints to make it able to roll like a droideka. not sure about that though.

Well, the spine does makes it seem like the rest of the alien can curl up into a wheel. If you decide to take it in that direction, think of it as an emergency escape function of the creature.

There are some desert spiders that have that ability, although they don't fold their legs at all, they do this sort of cartwheel-style tumble to move around quickly for transport or as an escape maneuver. Same concept.

ralusek

good call. the concept of making a perfect ball is kind of stressing me out. having it be an emergency thing could make it a lot less refined

Ged

it is an interesting use of the toolset, it would be hard to do this if your trying to work towards a concept drawing though wouldnt it? I mean pulling and moving parts only gets you so close to the desired shape?