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Hey Guys, how do I proceed with this mesh?

Wotcha, been lurking again for toooo loooong, decided to revisit a piece I started a long time ago and never finished, but I need your help to do this as the next stages are beyond my comprehension.......

The mesh started in Max was taken as a whole mesh into Zbrush and worked on a bit (the mesh shots in green) but it soon became apparent that the thickness of the coat was causing problems when sculpting or masking on it.

Something was going wrong and the mesh would collapse in on itself and if I tried to mask anything on it, the masking would always paint straight through the mesh onto both sides so I could not isolate each side of it to work on, and when sculpting with the clay brush it would affect the inside of the coat and pull the inside through to the outside and screw it up.This still happens even though the coat is a separate mesh now after doing some tests with it.

So my request to all you guys is, ......can you help advise me on how I take this char to the next level for Zbrush work, I am starting to break the mesh up into individual parts, head, hands, feet, trousers etc, in the hope it will be easier to manage, and also when using Xnormal to produce the normal maps, it will not matter if the parts are separate will it?

Help me out guys, I am really stuck here and pulling my hair out, it's really getting me down.

Thanks for any advise you can give to me.

MESH_HELP_1.jpg
MESH_HELP_2.jpg
HYDE_SUBD_3.jpg
HYDE_SUBD_4.jpg

Replies

  • jrmenace
    try not to change the silouette of the character tooo tooo much from low to high.ur low poly looks pretty good.n on seperating parts i dun think it would hurt,bcuz all your part are pretty much seperate aneyhow.with the coat i'd think u'r just sculpting in too deep maybe with not enuff polys there.You'd probaly b better off using a normal map generator in photoshop to get the right texture for the coat. also looks like around the neck some wierd stuff with the sculpt.neck merging with coat?not bad start tho hope critss help
  • stubbly
    jrmenace wrote: »
    try not to change the silouette of the character tooo tooo much from low to high.ur low poly looks pretty good.n on seperating parts i dun think it would hurt,bcuz all your part are pretty much seperate aneyhow.with the coat i'd think u'r just sculpting in too deep maybe with not enuff polys there.You'd probaly b better off using a normal map generator in photoshop to get the right texture for the coat. also looks like around the neck some wierd stuff with the sculpt.neck merging with coat?not bad start tho hope critss help

    Thanks for the feedback mate and your kind words.
    The blue mesh images I attached are from the most recent attempt to separate the mesh elements, and I have put a shirt collar in there, which is why the mesh looks untidy from that distance, and the green image is the first go at it when the mesh was all one piece with no collar and the neck was joined to the coat,so initial Zbrush subd made it look crap.

    The coat thing is a real problem to me, but I know coats and capes etc are done all the time, so I can't understand why this is such a headache.

    I did some masking tests in ZB and using a basic polymesh object, you can gradually squish it and mask on it, and you will get to a point where the masking will pop through to the other side of your mesh, sadly my coat is already there from the start, and to make it thicker would be silly and disproportionate to the character.......anyway I'm stumped!

    I hoped to go the route of Max - zbrush - 3DCoat for retopo - Xnormal - photoshop.
  • jrmenace
    [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNpg85wSQcQ&feature=related[/ame] heres kinda what i meant about upping the sub-d level on the coat just so you can sculpt out the details for the normal
  • stubbly
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