When and how to do it these things?

Kuledo

hey people, please i need some advice. I end up these very frustarted. It's really pain in ass, and i am doing, and trying but to be honest, i have no idea how do to. I am self taught, learning for tutorials, free or payed.But most of them are garbage, useless. SO these are things that bothering me.

-Can with max be created high poly, for cinematic and vfx character/ creature? Someone told me that 3d max is just for low poly?

-I have been watching tutorials where, some guys, when sculpting in Zbrush, in the middle of sculpting, the details, they put the model in topogun, do topology, and continue to sculpt. Why?

- When should i do uv's when i have the high poly model finished? Or before i start do high poly sculpting? Sorry i am confused, dunno how to ask this.

Noodle!

- yes you can, max is not only for low poly.

- I haven't seen too many do this, but likely to get a more even distribution of polygons. Don't take my word for it.

- you do uv's on your low poly, not high poly

Shiniku

Noodle pretty much covered it, but I'll add a little more.

- Max can create high-poly models as well. Although, generally speaking, for organic models it will be easier and faster to use zbrush or something similar for your high-poly. But for hard-surface stuff it's very useful in constructing the high poly.

- Yeah, usually you do this to more evenly distribute your polies for easier sculpting. The new(ish) feature Dynamesh kind of eliminates the need to do that most of the time.

-You unwrap your low-poly, not your high-poly. But as to when to do it? Wait until the shape and topology of your low-poly is finalized. A lot of the time you will make your high-poly first and then retopologize, and then UV map that. So generally I would say UV mapping comes after sculpting, but it depends on your situation.

Torch

I was gonna mention Dynamesh but Shiniku beat me to it. Do a lot of people retopo for easier sculpting? I just thought that and having to retopo once again to create your final game res mesh sounds like its gonna take a buttload of time when you gotta deadline to meet :-S

ZacD

If the sculpt is fighting against you, re-topo is not a horrible idea, I've seen people mostly do this when they start with a generic basemesh and they really change up the proportions and start to really stretch out the polygons. But I would agree dynamesh is the better option these days.

Ace-Angel

Yep, I can say that too. Too many time we artists had to retopo a model because you did some silhouette changes not planned out beforehand, Dyanmesh pretty much solved all these issues in one fell swoop, which also happens to be a very popular move in pokemon.

Bigjohn

Me personally, I don't like doing a full retopo if the geometry doesn't match the character anymore. What I do is use GoZ to get subdiv-1 into Max/Maya, and just rework the topology of the bad area. Often times it's just adding a few loops. But sometimes I have to completely delete a group of polys and rebuild that area's topology. It's still faster than full retopology though.