Head as same mesh or seperate?
polycounter lvl 7
I find that with the limited amount of ram I have, I'll often run out in zbrush if my character is a single, solid mesh, so I was wondering if you guys always generally keep these things as a solid mesh, or break it up somehow without messing up the normal map process ... ???
Replies
Just make sure the area where the mesh ends is covered by their clothing, or some bit of jewelery. You see this all the time on game characters. Take Dragon age for example... EVERYONE with a bare neck is wear a necklace. Aside from hiding the seam, it can also hide the big switch in texel resolution you see on game models.
even the men
Thats pretty clever, I actually never noticed that and I played the game.
Sometimes you could clearly see that body and head are separate meshes.
Then broke the model apart.
Then used the normal modifier in max to make sure all the vertex normals at the seams were pointing in the same direction.
But our game engine exported the vertex normals as they were in max, and didn't unify them.
You could theoretically normal map a broken apart model with edited vertex normals and get the same results as a solid mesh. But I've never tried it.
That´s why i only said it in regard to the game
Actually i liked the game eventhough it was far behind DA1.
In Maya you can either use transfer attributes to copy normals from one seam to another, or simply grab the verts on both objects' open edges and peform an "average normals" on them.
this would be on the high res mesh correct? Given Maya or max can handle the millions of polygons in the source art, this would work. If I was in zbrush, would it make a difference? can I sculpt seamlessly across subtools?
Thanks very mush for the replies dudes!
I don't think you can sculpt seamlessly across subtools, though you could possibly create a subtool for the seam area, and project it onto your other two subtools, possibly, I'm thinking this without trying.
As for in game, if you had a main character, you would most likely have it as one clean mesh (low poly), and tidy up any artifacts caused by seperate meshes in the baked maps in Photoshop. With this in mind, a seperate mesh for the head would be fine, though you will hit problems when sculpting the neck area for example.
For customized characters, all of the customized parts would be assembled by code, so the head would be a seperate mesh, and the artist would try and do their best to disguise the seam. This would mean that every asset would have to match at the seam areas, which isn't as simple to manage as you may think.
It isn't fair to say that engines SHOULD support custom normals, though it helps. Supporting custom normals is a big price to pay in terms of performance, as this means that not just the normals you want to affect need to have an extra bit of information stored in them, but every vertex on the model. I am speaking as an artist who has worked around programmers complaints about performance being affected by what we want. It's our job to work within their limits, and use whatever ingenuity we can to hammer something out with the most limited of means.
Ooo interesting. How do you do that?
Mud2011 can do that with the Subscription Advantage pack. 2012 has it by default.