how to sculpt hard surfaces like architectural props

Mayalicious

Hello there. I want to know that how can i sculpt hard surfaces ? I am not asking how to create a hard surface object in mudbox. I am wondering how can i sculpt an hard surface object (imported from maya to mudbox). For example i tried to work on a very basic building. I used split edge rings in sides to maintain the hard surface shape when subdividing in mudbox. But in some areas if there are too many rings side by side the sculpting brush in these areas giving me a weird noisy effect. You can look at the pictures to understand it. I really need to understand the workflow when working with these environment sets.





Can you share your techniques and some good enviroment sculpting tutorials that you know? Mudbox or zbrush. It doesnt matter. I just need to understand the workflow and mesh structure. By the way i am using Maya. Thanks!

THE 5

I've been looking for hardsuface sculpting techiques too lately.
Though I am a complete beginner when it comes to sculpting, here are my search results, weather they are usefull or not.

http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-mudbox/my-tips-tutorials-workflows/hard-surface-tips/ <- think you need to register first

http://download.autodesk.com/us/mudbox/video/support/essentials/mudbox_2011_hard_surface_freestyle_1044x879.html

Concerning your loops problem.
You need a even desity of quads all over the mesh bevore exporting, aswell as one or two itterations of relax... from what I have heard

Will Faucher

It depends what it is you want to do really. For a roof like that, I personally wouldn't sculpt it. I would probably use nDo or Crazybump to help with a normal map of that kind. Same goes with the walls of that house, I wouldn't sculpt that either, there is just not much point to it, especially if there is nothing more than what seems to be cement.

SpeCter

I´ve never seen roofs made of concrete bricks but what the heck, what will help you to sculpt better is to make an evenly divided basemesh, but like Prophecies said, you may be better of using nDo/Crazybump/insertTexture2NormalmapProgramHere .

Autocon

For sculpting you want your entire mesh to have close to evenly subdivided quads. This way all areas will have a similar density and you wont get low quality areas mixed with high quality ones.

As for the roof I wouldn't personally sculpt a large chunk like that. First decried what type of roof you want. Based on the color and a wild guess as to what you were going for you want a shingle type roof as brick would not work at all the way you have it. I would then make 4 different types of shingle slat things, evenly sub divided them, bring them into zbrush and sculpt them differently but not to differently you would notice obvious tiling.

Then I would bring them back into max, place them how I wanted and would bake to my lower geo.