Hi guys! We are planning to start a small project with a team of 4-5 people with UDK or CryEngine 3 if they provide a conveninent licensing option. We cannot afford to buy 3ds Max(or another major app) licenses for every artist(at least 2 artists). So, we are considering a pipeline without Max. Here are the tools I am planning to use:
Silo - SubD and low poly meshes, UV creation. Problem: does not support smoothing groups
ZBrush - sculpting
Messiah: Studio(no license yet) - rigging and animations. Problem: this does not support smoothing groups properly either. There's an angle limit for smooth/hard edges and that's all AFAIK.
iPi motion capture(no license yet) - we are not making a sports game or fighting game etc. this should be enough.
xNormal - all kinds of baking maps
Milkshape 3d - this supports smoothing groups but it's a pain to use.
Photoshop 6 - textures etc. (we don't have a license for a new version
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![dwdlxk.gif](http://i51.tinypic.com/dwdlxk.gif)
So, the major problem is smoothing groups. It can be solved by breaking edges until the animation step. Do you think it's reasonable to use broken edges in an animated game mesh? I think the vertex weighting step won't be perfect and cause problems.
Building models to fit a certain smoothing angle can be another solution but I don't know Messiah even exports them. The demo I installed won't export anything.
Any suggestion is more than appreciated. Thanks for reading.
Replies
free 3ds max.
can't blender do everything you want?
Thanks for the suggestions
anyway, why wouldn't breaking the mesh work? sure makes no difference for skinning - or shouldn't. obviously you'd have to break it before going through xnormal to ensure normal maps come out correctly.
I'm curious that the vertices on the different sides of the broken edges will get the same bone weights. That can cause opening of the mesh. And correcting these by hand would take a lot of time. I may be wrong too of course.
I'd recommend Blender if you can compromise on the art a bit. I like it, but it does have some drawbacks.
SubD - You're limited to 3 and 4 sided polygons, so hard surface modeling may be a bit of a challenge.
Sculpting - Can't push a ridiculous amount of polygons, so you'd have to sculpt up to mid-frequency and complement it with nDo maps. Depends on how beefy your hardware is though.
Baking - It does decent AO, very tweakable. Normal baking has no options though, so XNormal is still the better option here.
The vertex painting is very good too. I use it to lay down base colors and then bake that to a color map. It does 3D painting too, though pretty basic.
One thing I don't like is one of the normal map channels is flipped relative to what UDK uses.
Retopo - Works wonderfully. Snapping is responsive and accurate, and you can plan out your topology by sketching on the high poly with the grease pencil tool.
Smoothing Groups - Done through the Edge Split modifier. Mark hard edges on your mesh, and the verts are split at the modifier level. Best part is you only need to weight one vert on the original mesh, and the weight propagates to both verts on the split.
Rigging and animation - Fairly standard tools here, and everything you need. It's nothing fancy, but should be adequate.
I don't enjoy the weighting myself. It works like this- assign verts to a vertex group, and then name the bone you want them assigned to the same as the group. Then you can type in weights or weight paint, but unfortunately no vertex weight table.
that's about all I can come up with for now, 3D Coat might also be worth looking into, but if you want to keep your spending down, I'd stick with Blender.
Also I remember seeing some older Blender videos that showed some sort of .bvh file support. Not sure if that carried over to 2.5 yet but it could be a good thing to look into.
Before considering blender I would do some research on how good the FBX exporter is. that could be a real deal breaker. You may want to make a super simple rig and character and export it with animation to make sure its not gimped.
The geometry is very simple here but sometimes I have to break the geometry for baking purposes and that gives me some seams in the normal map too. I know how to fix regular texture seams but normal maps confuse me. Is it possible to bake maps with broken geometry and no visible seams?
Thanks for the input everyone