Starting the BASE MESH
polycounter lvl 6
If I were to a full naked male sculpt what would be the most effective way of starting the base mesh?
From my understanding when you create the base mesh the polygons should be fairly spread throughout the whole model so some parts of the model will not be more decimated than others.
Here is my knowledge of ways of starting a base mesh:
During my time in College we would make base mesh's out of Zspheres but Zpshere's alone is not really productive because when it's time to decimate the head you don't have a nose or ears to start decimating with and you would have to
Another way of making a base mesh is to start with Zspheres.. sculpt till you have the basic forms and retopo it in 3dsMax and import back into Zbrush
The last way of making a base mesh that I know of is creating the base mesh in 3dsmax from scratch using different views of a character's blue print and then importing it into Zbrush (which Is my personal last resort)
What is the best and most effective way of creating a base mesh for a full naked man? or any character really??...
From my understanding when you create the base mesh the polygons should be fairly spread throughout the whole model so some parts of the model will not be more decimated than others.
Here is my knowledge of ways of starting a base mesh:
During my time in College we would make base mesh's out of Zspheres but Zpshere's alone is not really productive because when it's time to decimate the head you don't have a nose or ears to start decimating with and you would have to
Another way of making a base mesh is to start with Zspheres.. sculpt till you have the basic forms and retopo it in 3dsMax and import back into Zbrush
The last way of making a base mesh that I know of is creating the base mesh in 3dsmax from scratch using different views of a character's blue print and then importing it into Zbrush (which Is my personal last resort)
What is the best and most effective way of creating a base mesh for a full naked man? or any character really??...
Replies
There are several ways you can create a base mesh, as you know. Each have their pros and cons, but ultimately the it's up to you to assess what you need to accomplish and approach things from there. It helps to gain little experience with each so that you're familiar with them, that way you'll have a better understanding of when a particular method would work well for what you need. Ultimately just do what you need to in order to create your highpoly and your lowpoly mesh, while meeting whatever criteria the project has laid out. Maybe you can go straight from a sculpt to the final mesh, or maybe you'll find it helpful to hammer out a rough shape first that then gets retopologized before more sculpting.
Zspheres are fast at building certain forms, while other shapes will require more work with the sculpting tools in order to get them into the correct shape. The edgeloops button can also help when it comes to setting up the eyes/mouth/ears.
Zspheres2/ZSketch is also fast and feels like laying down blobs of clay, but can leave you with a fairly dense mesh (which can always be retopologized).
Same deal with Shadowbox and Dynamesh. The latter works well for both organic and hard surface shapes. Sometimes I start out with a zsphere stick-figure armature that I have sitting in Lightbox, and then add volumes to it using the insert brushes + dynamesh.
(Any dense basemeshes generated from the methods above can easily be simplified using dynamesh or remesh with a lower resolution, QRemesher, or some manual retopology).
Modeling from a traditional program has it's advantages too. Sometimes it's easier to reuse an existing mesh that already has it's edgeflow and UVs laid out. Or if you're modeling something mechanical and would like to / need to use precise measurements. And don't forget about GoZ; feel free to bounce a mesh back and forth.
You can also grab some existing meshes at http://wiki.polycount.com/BaseMesh
Another way you could go is to maker you base mesh form in Sculptris(free) which does topology dynamically, goz to zbrush and qremesh; start working with that and subdividing for finer sculpting.
You can work on features (such as an ear) as isolated subtools as well if you find that's easier to maintain and merge (vid tutorials on pixologic zclassroom site) onto your base when you're ready. You don't even necessarily have to merge if you're using the highpoly for bakes.
If you're working by making isolated features (ears, nose, arms, hands) as their own subtools, it may be cool to make them their own ztools to export (as a ztool or an obj) in order to build a library of features for future use (another free program, meshmixer, is good for merging meshes onto other meshes, but you can also use zbrush; there are video tutorials on the pixologic site if you're interested in this mentality).
If you need to animate the character then topology is super important. For human characters I find just box modeling it out to be the easiest, because you can work out proportions and topology all together in one shot. Then depending on how many polygons you want just sculpt and refine the forms in zbrush, and bake out the fine detail to normal maps. Some people like to do everything in zbush and then retopo later so it really depends on the personal preference
If the model doesn't need to animate then just use zspheres and decimation master to get a rough and dirty model.
Get the high poly sculpt down with as few hookups as possible and when that's done build your manual topology on top. Building the final topology at the end is generally a good idea because at that point you know conclusively what you're dealing with; if anything changed along the way you'd have to rebuild the mesh at the end anyway.
But there is magic learning! Learn topology, that's it really. Once you do, it's up to you to learn the ins and outs of what you want, how many polies, who to build it, etc.