Polygonal modeling vs sculpting?

melviso

Hanging out with my buddies,and an argument ensues about which is better:Modeling traditionally with Maya/3dmax or using Zbrush or Mudbox.

For me,I have tried using Zbrush or mudbox for sculpting my character faces especially when using references as a guide but it is problematic for me.I prefer using Maya to model the faces with polys,most time my characters topology gets messed up but I continue this till I get the likeness of the character,cleaning up and controling the egdes and verts till I get my character.I add new details like clothes et.c by modelling everything in Maya.Peharps what I love is the precise control unlike sculpting with Mudbox or Zbrush.Most of my friends use Zbrush but some of us still use Maya and 3dmax.I even model the cracks on walls with Maya.I guess the thing is the precision of what you are doing and what you expect is higher with poly modelling than sculpting from scratch.That does not mean I don't use Mudbox for adding fine details like roughness on the wall or wrinkles on clothes.

Am I being left behind?I don't mind working with precision on a character even if it takes slightly more time as against ZBrush or mudbox as far as I get exactly what I want especially when trying to reproduce a character designed by someone else or a client.

cryrid

It entirely depends on the artist and the project. Many have no problem getting the exact control and speed they need when sculpting.

passerby

there all just tools, the idea is the learn them and use them in the circumstances that each tool is best for.

MadnessImport

Personal preference + All depends on what your doing
The Sculptors and the Traditional modelers are suppose to work together to get the job done. Alone they Achieve but together they conquer

Stretch the truth a bit and Rant at them on how Godly Maya's Sculpting tools are

Ace-Angel

I cannot stand modeling in Max anymore since ZB became so robust, especially for HD now, but I do use Max for quicker and more 'radial' assets.

However, a friend of mine cannot sculpt to save his life, but can do all kinds of quick flimsy stuff in ZB since he's not fully using it for whole assets.

Like the others said, it's your ability, time and wish to learn such things. There is nothing wrong with not knowing ZB per say as a 'full' package or not knowing Max as a 'full' package, just make sure you know one, and maybe abit of the other, and you're set.

Although I have to say, they both work together, last I checked, Booleans in Traditional software was a mess and ZB doesn't allow for Shader or proper retopology.

cryrid

It allows for proper retopology, it's just painfully slow and manual.

MainManiac

depends how much control you want over your art. Zbrush gives a large amount and is more artistically inclined, while modeling is more problem solving and overall design.

Gestalt

If you are zoomed in on verts and moving them one by one you can lose a sense of the big picture and what makes something 'work' as a whole. If you are doing organic work, like faces, then there is no other option imo: sculpt precisely the form you want and don't even think about the topology until the end when you know exactly what the form is. For organics you want to be able to focus fully on the form, and that's what sculpting programs are great at. You may want to make a basic low-poly from orthographic views etc, but once you are comfortable working with a sculpting program you probably won't even need to bother (for organics anyway, not for precise or modular pieces such as architecture).

I usually start with a sphere (sometimes start in Sculptris) and reproject with dynamesh in Zbrush until I establish the basic form. If you want to keep a workflow with orthographic references then there are still plenty of ways of doing that in sculpting programs (turn off perspective and snap to your views and use the move tool to match your references; or start by using shadowbox and carve away at that).

For hard-surface it really depends. You honestly are probably better off modeling all hard-surface parts and pieces by hand in an app; you will get clean and well preserved results. People have their own ways of doing things though so it really depends on who you are and what you're working on. Making ornate details with many pieces of floating geometry tends to better geared toward a modelling program in my experience. Making modular pieces is something that you are definitely going to need to establish primarily in a modeling program. Making something like armor could go either way depending on how you work and what's comfortable (in my experience modeling by hand feels 'safer' for those types of things, but using a sculpting program is more iterative and dynamic). For something like armor you could even use a rough sculpt as a foundation to model on to preserve the composition while giving you the clean control and manageability of modeling by hand.

gray

melviso wrote: »

Am I being left behind?I

well i don't know. i think anyone boasting about being a zsphere master is probably not so much ahead of the pack but more of a 2.5d weirdo...

if your talking about modeling everything from a sphere then thats just dumb from a production point of view. even starting out with a dyna-mesh blob or a sphere voxel in 3dcoat is kind of a waste of time, especially for heads, hands that have very precise proportions. once you have some nice heads that are roughly how you like then its just much faster to start sculpting on on that.

i tend to disagree with your point about precision. wacoms are much more precise then mice but require a much tighter hand eye coordination. so what you see as lack of precision is really more precision then what your use to and therefor harder to control. this does take time, if you try to do some digital sketching that will sharpen your pen skills in a way that you can see instantly. trying to draw straight lines in photoshop etc.

there is lots of stuff that can be sculpted from a blob much quicker then by box modeling. cracks, rock, trees, most organic thing imo. and its more fun to.
so in production i would choose someone with sculpting skills over someone without.

if you take a job and the workflow involves sculpting from scratch you should be comfortable that you can do your best work in that workflow. imo we will see more and more upfront concept sculpting and texturing where things can get approved at the sculpt level before there is any real model to hand off to rigging or animation.

don't you want to sculpt stuff? :poly136: man, for me sculpting made everything so much more fun. and bumped my skill level way up. i love it. just try to do some personal work and have fun with it. if you put the time in you will get comfortable and love it. you don't need to abandon poly modeling. you can pick the best workflow based on the object you need to make.

cryrid

even starting out with a dyna-mesh blob or a sphere voxel in 3dcoat is kind of a waste of time, especially for heads, hands that have very precise proportions

I don't know about that. I'm a big fan of kit-bashing a variety of basemeshes (from very basic ones to the more refined and pre-UV'd kind), but at the same time if you were to watch someone like Ryan Kingslien sculpt a character in his anatomy workshops, that guy can hammer out some very precise proportions for heads and hands very quickly.

And if I'm doing a creature that's not a standard human, there's a very good chance I'd be able to use a sculpting program to get something that resembles the model I want quicker than if I were to try and model it the old fashion way.

gray

generally if you have 2,3,4... characters 'humans' then you would try to settle on 1 mesh that would work for those characters. then sculpt each character on that mesh. and only break out a unique mesh if you absolutely need to for some reason. that gives you one set of uvs. one set of weights etc. saves you unimaginable amounts of time and gray hairs for every dept.

even if your working on one character generally you already have a gen human laying around to start with that has a nice topology already and good proportions so you can save yourself some work by sculpting on that and have most of your re surf done.

if someone wants to sculpt everything from a sphere that's fine. but if there is a gen mesh with a set vertex order you need to hand off that exact mesh. how you get there is your business. but imo your just fighting the flow and making more work for yourself.

huge time saveing production decisions usually trump artistic freedom.

outside of production the whole thing gets hazy to me now. because whats a base mesh whats a sculpt? i got half sculpted stuff poly models high-res animation cages. finished stuff. i don't even think about it to much anymore.

i think one question is do you start with a base mesh and do quad subdiv or start with voxels dynamesh etc. that seems to be the main thing now in my workflow. I stick with a import mesh and subdiv. what level of detail i put into that mesh is not so important because i can sculpt what i need regardless.
and there is a number of tricks you can do with a subdiv mesh with uvs that give you more options in the workflow. plus im more into mudbox. dynamesh and voxels have not really given me the polycount and stability for end to end sculpting that you get with a sibdiv mesh.

@cryrid your points are valid. there is no one right way to do it. everyone has there own workflow. and most of them work just fine.

BUT NO FUCKING NERBS! sorry had to say that...

Gestalt

once you have some nice heads that are roughly how you like then its just much faster to start sculpting on on that.

Yeah that goes without saying, if you already have things to start from that have the proper proportions, or if you are in production and need to make multiple variations of the same mesh, then yeah start from those.

Being able to sculpt from scratch and understanding anatomy without reference is a very good skill to have and it takes a lot of practice, so if you are not in a production setting and are doing this stuff for portfolio work then I'd start from scratch (you may not have a choice if you don't have things to build from anyway).

As for some of gray's other points, if you are using dynamesh/voxels/dynamic (which you will you probably want to for sculpts; restricting yourself at this stage is a bad idea and usually unnecessary) then you are losing the UV data and topology in the sculpting process. In this case start with the base mesh you are reusing to sculpt on, but instead of going to the lowest subdivision level at the end (which could very well look like shit) and thinking your done, reimport a decimated version of your sculpt to snap the original low-poly, getting precisely the low poly you want while still reusing the mesh. I bake my maps in xNormal so I need an exported low and high-poly anyway, so I never intend to do the whole process in Zbrush.

This is essentially the same workflow as before, but you are using a specific low-poly and not just rebuilding one.

s6

I personally believe programs such as zbrush will one day replace packages like max and Maya. As hardware gets more powerful the limits on how many polies our computers can handle will fade, until there is little to no restriction to what you can create, and with how many polies. Like others have said above, Zbrush has come leaps and strides with each update and new version released. if they keep adding such major features like Shadowbox and dynamesh it will only be a matter of time until they can do everything max can, And faster.

This is my personal opinion, As someone who uses zbrush religiously

melviso

I watched a friend sculpt a character from a base mesh in zBrush using reference images.It was basically the same thing as modeling,only difference is was done faster.I wonder if one can create say a mechanical piece with Zbrush with bolts and nuts.He mentioned something like shadowbox.I find the 2.5d environment in ZBrush problematic.How do you move say a bolt or a subtool to a particular area on another mesh inside ZBrush?
I love precision but I guess one should learn to embrace change and if it makes one work faster and then do retopology with Topogun,I will give it a spin.

artquest

melviso wrote: »

I watched a friend sculpt a character from a base mesh in zBrush using reference images.It was basically the same thing as modeling,only difference is was done faster.I wonder if one can create say a mechanical piece with Zbrush with bolts and nuts.He mentioned something like shadowbox.I find the 2.5d environment in ZBrush problematic.How do you move say a bolt or a subtool to a particular area on another mesh inside ZBrush?
I love precision but I guess one should learn to embrace change and if it makes one work faster and then do retopology with Topogun,I will give it a spin.

You still have a full 3D grid in zbrush that you can use as a guide as you move and rotate opjects using the transpose tool. It's really not that different at all.

Soon we'll have auto retopo from pixologic! which means we get even more freedom. Imagine being able to do a rough 3d sculpt, then a paintover, now you have your concept. concept gets approved, bam you hit the auto retopo, do some cleanup work and then start working on the real thing. I can't wait.


But as many others have said, it's all about the project needs. I make it a point to learn as much new software as I can so that if a project requires something I know where to go to get it done the fastest. Where you can get your work done the fastest is really up to personal preference.

I like to think of it as knowing how to use more than one brush as a painter. more tools in the tool box = time savings.

melviso

I agree but learning a new software takes time and some brainwork when u are busy.Maybe ZBrush is worth all the noise I have been hearing lately from my buddies.

Gestalt

I wonder if one can create say a mechanical piece with Zbrush with bolts and nuts

I suggest taking a look at Eat3d's 'ZBrush Hard Surface Techniques'. I've only seen the first one, so I can't really say which of the two would be better to get (although you may want to look into the 2nd since it takes 4R2 into account), either way, they will give you a much better idea of the types of hard surface work you can do and how.

melviso

Does anyone know where I can download the original offline documentation of Zbrush that explains the basic features of ZBrush like Masking,transpose,topology e.t.c?Most of the pdfs available focuses on the new features of Zbrush 4r2,4 and 3.5.

Thanks.