Apparent weird surface topology issue...
polycounter lvl 6
Greetings to all. First post from me and I'm already a pain in the ass...
I bring this issue before you gents and ladies because polycount comes highly recommended by my Zbrush instructor as a place where friendly and knowledgeable artists who are serious about the the gaming industry hang out.
I'll mostly let the screen caps that I've taken speak for themselves as the problem is painfully obvious when seen.
The collection of images (there are five) is here:
http://imgur.com/a/iUmaC
01 shows a portion of my hard surface project that I'm working on in 3ds Max immediately prior to my moving to Zbrush.
02 shows the model with extra detail applied in Zbrush and ready for decimation.
03 shows the same surface after decimation.
04 shows the decimated reference in Topogun which is where the clusterf_ckery begins.
04a shows eg: "garbage in, garbage out".
*
It seems to me that I just need to jigger an export setting or two in Zbrush or some sort of setting in Topogun to get this issue resolved. What's the problem here, what should I do?
respectfully,
pf
I bring this issue before you gents and ladies because polycount comes highly recommended by my Zbrush instructor as a place where friendly and knowledgeable artists who are serious about the the gaming industry hang out.
I'll mostly let the screen caps that I've taken speak for themselves as the problem is painfully obvious when seen.
The collection of images (there are five) is here:
http://imgur.com/a/iUmaC
01 shows a portion of my hard surface project that I'm working on in 3ds Max immediately prior to my moving to Zbrush.
02 shows the model with extra detail applied in Zbrush and ready for decimation.
03 shows the same surface after decimation.
04 shows the decimated reference in Topogun which is where the clusterf_ckery begins.
04a shows eg: "garbage in, garbage out".
*
It seems to me that I just need to jigger an export setting or two in Zbrush or some sort of setting in Topogun to get this issue resolved. What's the problem here, what should I do?
respectfully,
pf
Replies
Were it another program such as XSI, I imagine changing the surface discontinuity angle could do the trick. I'm not sure what the Topogun equivalent would be though.
pf
'You can also choose between smooth or flat shading of the subdivision mesh by checking or unchecking the Smooth Shade checkbox in the Subdivision Parameters window:'
Does that make any difference? That seems to be the only option I can find regarding how Topogun handles normals. 3DS Max should have a lot more possibilities.
It was my understanding that the subdivision prefs in Topogun mostly just had to do with viewport rendering and performance and not map generation etc. etc. But whatever, I fired up topogun and flipped the pref on and off to see what would happen to the surface. Nothing changed. I did not generate maps with the setting on and off though and at this juncture, I don't think that it would be a good usage of time. Here's why:
So I looked at poopipe's post and I didn't think that he/she understands what's going on at all....and then I thought again and said to myself, waitaminute, maybe poopipe isn't talking about whether or not my surface in Max started out nice and clean with no tris or ngons...maybe he/she is wanting me to take a lookie at the stuff that came out of Zbrush in Max before going to Topogun.
Because of how the post-decimated model looked in Zbrush, I hadn't considered this before. Zbrush wasn't showing any issue, right? See pic 4 again if necessary.
I didn't think that this was what the problem was.
But I went and took the model into Max anyway (a 2.02 million face model really made Max choke and mocked my graphics card for its impotence!) and lookie here:
Pic 5 shows a composite screen cap from studio max with shading and a ghost of the wireframe over the top.
It was my understanding that the subdivision prefs in Topogun mostly just had to do with viewport rendering and performance and not map generation etc. etc. But whatever, I fired up topogun and flipped the pref on and off to see what would happen to the surface. Nothing changed. I did not generate maps with the setting on and off though and at this juncture, I don't think that it would be a good usage of time. Here's why:
So I looked at poopipe's post and I didn't think that he/she understands what's going on at all....and then I thought again and said to myself, waitaminute, maybe poopipe isn't talking about whether or not my surface in Max started out nice and clean with no tris or ngons...maybe he/she is wanting me to take a lookie at the stuff that came out of Zbrush in Max before going to Topogun.
Because of how the post-decimated model looked in Zbrush, I hadn't considered this before. Zbrush wasn't showing any issue, right? See pic 4 again if necessary.
I didn't think that this was what the problem was.
But I went and took the model into Max anyway (a 2.02 million face model really made Max choke and mocked my graphics card for its impotence!) and lookie here:
Pic 5 shows a composite screen cap from studio max with shading and a ghost of the wireframe over the top.
It's actual geometry. The decimation, even though it looks fine in Zbrush, is jacked up. At this point, I'm pretty sure that I need to redecimate AFTER I learn more about how to fine-tune the decimation master's settings.
pf
It's actual geometry. The decimation, even though it looks fine in Zbrush, is jacked up. At this point, I'm pretty sure that I need to redecimate AFTER I learn more about how to fine-tune the decimation master's settings.
pf
can you affect normal smoothing in topogun?
It looks fine in zbrush because zbrush doesn't average the normals. Everything is flat shaded and faceted, and it looks smooth purely due to the density. If you take it into another program that does decide to average the normals across the entire surface, you're going to see the thin triangulation act up like that as it's trying to blend the shading across the entire face.
If Topogun doesn't let you change the settings, then once again, just bring it into Max and change the value at which normals are being automatically split and do your baking there.
Edit: an image to show how vertex normals control the end result.
Sir, I feel like you're trying to teach me something really important but even with the cycling .gif that you have there, I don't know what you're talking about. I feel like a total dumbasss.
In other news, Max kept choking on my model when I would try to use to bake so I redecimated to get a lower total face count. Now everything is "cool" and Max is cooperating except for that bit where if the reference mesh doesn't break the surface of the low-poly mesh, then the maps that come out have holes in them and the 'in-program' render has huge red blotches all over it describing where the ray-misses happened.
pf
The maps have come out just fine this time around. Thanks a whole lot you guys for your help.
To follow up, and because it looks good, I'm going to invest some time in Millenium's weapns creation tut where he does that shotty. I'm hoping that he'll show me some things that I don't know.
pf