Game 3D Models Vs. Movie 3D Models
polycounter lvl 4
What are the major differences?
I ask because I used to make game models but now I want to make models for movies.
So from my understanding game models uses normal maps and movie models use displacement maps?
Movie models and game models both need to have good topology but movie models do not need retopology because they are allowed to have higher topology? and lets say you have buttons on cloth, in games, you will need to retopo that, but in movies the button and cloth's mesh are allowed to be separated, right?
I also asked this awesome artist called ian Spriggs whether he uses PBR in his work he said no, so i guess movie models dont use PBR, it instead requires you to tweak metalic sliders etc. in renderers like V-Ray?
And hairs are done in cards in games and strands by strands in movies, right?
I also saw that textures (for example denim textures) are mapped to normal maps in games. But for movies, you use displacement maps instead?
when painting game models i use Substance Painter. But can Substance Painter be used to paint movie models? because SP uses PBR but is not required in movies. How is Mari different or better compared to SP?
Hope you guys can correct me if there is anything i said is wrong. Or if there is anything major that i missed, please let me know.
I ask because I used to make game models but now I want to make models for movies.
So from my understanding game models uses normal maps and movie models use displacement maps?
Movie models and game models both need to have good topology but movie models do not need retopology because they are allowed to have higher topology? and lets say you have buttons on cloth, in games, you will need to retopo that, but in movies the button and cloth's mesh are allowed to be separated, right?
I also asked this awesome artist called ian Spriggs whether he uses PBR in his work he said no, so i guess movie models dont use PBR, it instead requires you to tweak metalic sliders etc. in renderers like V-Ray?
And hairs are done in cards in games and strands by strands in movies, right?
I also saw that textures (for example denim textures) are mapped to normal maps in games. But for movies, you use displacement maps instead?
when painting game models i use Substance Painter. But can Substance Painter be used to paint movie models? because SP uses PBR but is not required in movies. How is Mari different or better compared to SP?
Hope you guys can correct me if there is anything i said is wrong. Or if there is anything major that i missed, please let me know.
Replies
IIRC normal maps (bump maps?) are also used in film (as well as displacement maps, obviously), I think it just depends on what the situation calls for.
I don't work in film so I don't know what renderers are commonly used for hollywood films but I would be very surprised to learn that "PBR is not required for movies". Things might not be done in exactly the same way as PBR for games but I am guessing that some sort of physically based rendering systems are used for rendering in film (at least CG intended to be used in conjunction with live action film).
Normal maps are used but as stated above they tend to be for smaller details rather than to simulate geometry that you can't afford to render (because you can afford to render it)
Retopology is required because you still need to rig things and the idea that you can freely sling billions of triangles about is false as it will still contribute to increases in render time - which gets very expensive.
Yes, you can use substance Painter - any offline renderer worth a damn will support the creation of a shader that can take output from it happily.
there's a vfx focused version coming soon I believe which I imagine will have better udim support and hopefully more control over lighting
Hair can be done using strands in realtime. It's just a matter of whether you can afford to do enough other stuff at the same time.
In short...
There really isn't much difference in workflow and techniques for modeling. The biggest gaps are in simulation, surfacing and lighting where offline renderers are able to make use of techniques that aren't possible purely on GPU and certainly aren't tenable in realtime.
If anyone else wants to say more, please do so. so i can make even better decisions when making my models.
Something the film industry uses all the time is alembic caches:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-332E42EB-148B-4AFC-8F8C-B912470609C6-htm.html
They're just a handy way to have millions of polygons on display without actually having to have the render quality models loaded.
Mari is the same as painter, the only difference is that substance is going to be better in a few years mari is better for big big asset since you can paint on multiple udim and you have loats of cool pipeline stuff in it. It's more production friendly I'd say
Also UVs are a big thing, you ( kinda ) don't have any limit using udim, so you may have 20 2k map on a single mesh, and I mean one mesh not a character with multiple props on him, one cube can have 20 x 2k map
Cheers!