mudbox mac, cd4, normals maps
polycounter lvl 19
I've never connected the three, but just landed a decent gig to make 4 highly detailed character models for static rendered output. Anyone have any experience in this?
I was thinking of the following setup:
base mesh in cd4 > disconnect into separate parts > detail parts in mudbox and save back out > texture in mudbox and save back out > load up parts in cd4 and bake normal maps > load base mesh back into cd4, apply textures and normals > make final renders.
Never done it this way before but have been watching you guys for a few years get your heads around this kind of high poly workflow.
As I say, doesn't have to be real time so the normal mapping might not be important, but loading the model in for rendering in is, and I'm not sure how many polygons it can handle before it dies.
Advice on this matter very welcome.
I was thinking of the following setup:
base mesh in cd4 > disconnect into separate parts > detail parts in mudbox and save back out > texture in mudbox and save back out > load up parts in cd4 and bake normal maps > load base mesh back into cd4, apply textures and normals > make final renders.
Never done it this way before but have been watching you guys for a few years get your heads around this kind of high poly workflow.
As I say, doesn't have to be real time so the normal mapping might not be important, but loading the model in for rendering in is, and I'm not sure how many polygons it can handle before it dies.
Advice on this matter very welcome.
Replies
I also agree that you'd be better with displacement maps for offline renders, C4D handles them well too.
I'm also not sure if C4D offers High/Low Geometry baking and if it does, how well it works. I know they go on about baking from displacement maps but I've never fully understood if that means you can just bake from a high poly to a low poly.
I'm assuming you probably know all this though!
Regardless, you could always bake your map from your sculpting package which would also save you having to bring the millions of polys into C4D.
Im a c4d user myself and it has a somewhat weird baking workflow.
It doesnt bake high poly onto a low poly cage mesh it bakes it normal maps only from
the high poly so its pretty useless when you have a high poly without uvs.
So xnormal as part of the workflow should work better for you or baking in mudbox
but im a zbrush user so i dont know about that part.
Normal maps can be a bit weird in cinema so additional displacement maps with sub
polygon displacement could be necesarry to get a nice look.
Best to just try that part out.
Cinema 4d can have scaling issues when importing exporting so you should get yourself the riptide plugin that helps a lot. Theres a demo version for 30 days thats fully functional so you probably wont need to purchase it.
With a decent rig 2-3 million polygons wont make it crash but as i sayd the normal map
baking is useless at most times.
cheers
thanks for the advice here, I'll be back very soon probably, tearing my hair out.