Hard Surface Sculpting: Max to Mudbox

CuddlyColin

Hey everbady!
This is probably something I can search for (but don't usually get good results based on the wording), but I'm working on an environment piece that I've blocked out in Max and want to bring into Mudbox to sculpt on. Is there any good tutorials on the most effective way to do this or even on the typical pipeline used to do hard surface sculpts? Perhaps this particular project might work out better if it wasn't done in Mudbox, any opinions you guys have would be very helpful

This is what I'm working on:


This is what it looks like coming into Mudbox:


Obviously it's having issues with my edge loops and smoothing, which I know how to (tediously) fix, but it seems like if I have to fix all those edge loops in Max, I might as well just make the high poly there and what's the purpose of sculpting?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I'm kinda new to the whole high poly pipeline but definitely want to figure it out.

nick2730

can you show the wireframe for your building. Mudbox is tries to subdivide the mesh itself, you need to add edgeloops and support edges to your mesh to control how it will subdivide in max and maintain your shape. Basically apply a turbosmooth modify inside of max, and thats how mudbox will sub-d

CuddlyColin

I figured I just needed to add edge loops. I'm more asking, what's a common pipeline for this sort of work? I've gotten to this point and feel like I maybe should have been creating a high poly mesh in max instead of a low poly to sculpt later?

The only experience I have with mudbox and zbrush is pure sculpting, which works on shapes that you don't mind being smooth (like humans forms) but, obviously, doesn't work the same way when you bring in something you want to keep the edges of.

I have done a decent amount of high poly bakes in max, I'm just trying to understand this way of doing it as well.

nick2730

yea alot of people tend to create the high poly first, cause then you can either just subtract edges in max or use a different program to create the low poly like topogun or something.

For an object like this you may want to think about a modular construction approach as oppose to bringing the entire object in mudbox

CuddlyColin

Yeah, I've set each piece up pretty modularly, I figured I'd end up sculpting each tower and the main building individually. I just crammed 'em all together to easily edit all their UVS onto one big ol' sheet.

Thanks for the advice! I'll just go back and do a high poly bake mesh for the basic normal map, then take that into mudbox to add damage and stuff too.

sprunghunt

for a mudbox base model you want to make sure that your mesh is divided up into even sized polygons. Using a mesh with edgeloops and triangles will give you bad results. The edgeloops will give you uneven polygon density and the triangles will cause funny smoothing.

on the left hand side of this image are some mudbox base meshes I made a while ago:


rockwall_cage_normalmap by sprunghunt, on Flickr

Notice how basic the model is? That's what I'd make for your mesh. For environment stuff you rarely need much more than what I've got there.

I would also strongly suggest splitting this up into smaller assets as Nick2730 mentioned. Even if you just combine them together later in max. It's much faster if you only have to make one dome and repeat it.

smoothing
If you want mudbox to respect your smoothing groups you can uncheck the "smooth positions" checkbox in mesh>add subdivision level dialog box in mudbox. I usually do this for environment assets as they're often rectangular.

pior

You can also take a totally different approach and use Zbrush in order to remesh/reproject your object into a very uniform quad-based topology. Then send that to Mudbox and detail there. Its a very little known workflow, its a bit hard to explain. If you're fine with that I can make a vid illustrating that on one of your building components.

THE 5

Turbosmooth your model in max and tick "Seperate by Smoothing groups" and turn your itterations up to 4 or so. Then export this dense mesh to mudbox. The smoothing problem should be gone that way, the n-gons that might cause stretching not

I think this is pretty much what perna means with 4.

CuddlyColin

Well...I wrote a big ol' post about what I was doing, but it got deleted when I tried to submit (yay). Anyway, it was basically, saying "Thanks for the help!". I do appreciate it, and I've learned a lot in the process.

Jesse Moody

Welcome to polycount Colin. Glad to see you posting.

Do you still have the tutorial stuff I wrote up and sent out for all the dev days while at Budcat? A lot of that should help now with this.

As Per said is there a specific reason to sculpt this building? As the whole thing?

Do you have a concept for us?

If I was doing something like this I would break it up into its pieces and start at that point.

It is hard to really say without seeing the concept or piece you are working from.

So yeah I would do probably most of this whole piece right in max though.

Post more and ask away. Tons of guys on here to help out.

CuddlyColin

Blugh, tumblr doesn't like having it's images linked apparently:



That's the blockout with reference.

I'm going to end up doing the high poly just in max, like you guys are suggesting, just because I know how to do that.

I mainly wanted to sculpt this because I don't have any sculpted pieces and I figured I'd try to learn the process of taking an asset from concept to finish and include sculpting in the process. I understand you wouldn't sculpt things like this necessarily, but I figured I'd try, just to learn how. Anyway, I've gained a lot from trying, but am also still very confused. I think I'll just stick to high poly modeling in max. That stuff makes sense.

Jesse Moody

After seeing the concept there are parts of this I would sculpt. If you are going for a not so realistic approach and kinda stylized you could really put a lot of nice stuff in there with the sculpting.

Looking at your concept I can see some parts that are easily repeatable/reused and how it should be broken apart. Don't think of it as one giant solid piece. Block it out like you got and then seperate each piece into its own and work on them one at a time.

- Do the sculpts for that piece.
- Then the low poly
- Bakes and Textures

Move on to next section and repeat until you are done.


Here is my suggestion really quickly...