Mudbox
polycounter lvl 14
Mudbox...How does anyone create anything with this system hog? It appears to be a sucker for mesh density above 1.5 million. simply opening and saving an existing scene with a mere 2 million faces sends my system into a chugging twisting cry for help. Its no wonder that busts seem to be about 75% of all mud box models out there. It would be suicidal to create a full character unless you had the most expensive system on the market.
In Zbrush 2 I can reach nearly 6 - 7 million faces with ease. I have a fairly descent system in today's standards. Yet Mudbox crunches like nobodies business. Anyone else experience or share my agony in using mudbox and are there things I can do to improve performance for mudbox (drastically)?
In Zbrush 2 I can reach nearly 6 - 7 million faces with ease. I have a fairly descent system in today's standards. Yet Mudbox crunches like nobodies business. Anyone else experience or share my agony in using mudbox and are there things I can do to improve performance for mudbox (drastically)?
Replies
It makes no sense to show the head or legs when you're only working on the torso. Hide them, and keep working. If you need to look at the entire mesh to ensure that everything flows well, just show the hidden parts and hit the space bar. This will allow you to look at the mesh, without sculpting it.
There are a lot of tools you can use to help combat slowdown. Check out the Mudbox forums for more.
512 ram
1.8 ghz Pentium 4
GeForce FX 5200
and the thing can churn out over 2 million polies! without using the technique CheeseOnToast suggested! but then again, i was jiding parts that i wasn't working on... the only problem with that was i'd sometime mistakedly up the subD level, and then the model would have a seam between the hidden and unhidden parts... once u get used to it, its an amazing program
Yes yes you can select specific areas and sub-D those but it does that layer lock thing, until they figure a way around that I'll keep pre-Sub-D'ing on continuous meshes.
correct me if i'm wrong.
When you export a mesh with partial subDs, it automatically brings the rest of the mesh up to the highest level, to get rid of any seams. So if you're using a command-line normal or displacement mapper that can handle higher polycounts than you can actually display, that's when to use partial SubDs.
I've started freezing the few polys around the seam after shutting off "freeze inactive" it's not perfect but at least it makes it easier to paint across, and to weld later in max.
So, whats the explanation?
I'm sure someone else will be able to explain this much better than I can, but the meshes created in these sculpting programs are never animated or imported into games. Rather, the detail is baked down into a lower resolution model's UVs in the form of a displacement or normal map (games). This is much less resource intensive than true polygonal detail.
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But if you apply a displacement map and you want it to appear the best as possible, you need to but upgrade the number of poly, otherwise, it would just have been faster to make the whole things and modify it in a normal 3d tool such as Maya, 3DS... nah?
And for the normal map, you just modify your character, you don't create it.
As for the statement "and for the normal map, you just...." I'm not sure what you are saying here but no you don't make a character with the normal map but you do add a ton of detail to the model that can't be rendered by the game engine because of poly restraints.
As for the statement "and for the normal map, you just...." I'm not sure what you are saying here but no you don't make a character with the normal map but you do add a ton of detail to the model that can't be rendered by the game engine because of poly restraints.
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And I was waiting to see if someone could destroy my arguments and you tell a lots of things that I didn't even said
I said, for the normal map, you don't create the character under mudbox or zbrush, you just MODIFY it. So what's the purpose of modeling under Zbrush or Mudbox.
Everyone of you said that was for displacement or normal map which is for refining an already made model, but for CREATING a model, this is just a big waste of time.
Sorry if it wasn't clear
Games-
1. Knock out a quick base mesh in max/maya/xsi etc. just to get the main forms in and try to keep the polygons square and fairly uniform size.
2. Take into mudbox/zbrush/silo, sculpt in a huge amount of detail.
3. Build a low poly mesh (that will be in a game)around the high poly,
4. Bake across the detail as a normal map
Film-
1. Model your character in max/maya/xsi so it is animatable.
2. Take model into zbrush/mudbox/silo, sclupt in a huge amount of detail
3 Bake detail into a displacement map
4. Apply displacement map to original, animatable model in max/maya/xsi
5. Render
Though there are variations of these workflows.
It's true that sculpting is just modifying the model, by pushing verts in or pulling them out, moving them a bit etc. But the speed (and ease) you can do this, and the level of detail you can work in quickly, is just not managable in standard 3D apps (max/maya/xsi etc.).
Watch the video of this guy making a colossus, and think how long it would take to do that in a standard 3D app.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=045693
Yea, zbrush is also a big waste of time for making gun fights!!
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LMFAO...Yeah I can see how that would be a waste ...
Yeah, now it could make sense. Thanks
But I still thinks that these programs are more editing/refining tools than creations. Because somes of these steps could have been modified/removed so you just have to edit the mesh.
The only reason you could create a mesh from nothing, would be for creates images, thats probably why they said it was more like a painting tool.
i am doing very rough basemeshes(cubemen) and then creating
something, i am not MODIFYING it.
also, in zbrush you can start from zspheres, sculpt over it,
retopology, applying details from old mesh, paint texture over high rez, then extracting model(for lowpoly), uv it in unfold, import, bake color map and normal map.
hope that will be useful info.
anyway, in response to the original topic - mudbox is noticeably slower than Z2 and worlds apart from the performance of Z3 indeed. the work-machine doesn't go too well beyond 2 mio and you get dotty strokes as a result.
i'm too lazy/unorganized to play the hide/unhide game tho, workflow/interface is nicer than Z's but the slowness bothers me more, personally because it comes into play long before i reach the detailing-stage.
even the interface is quite sluggish itself. at least they managed to fix some nasty bugs with the more recent releases. if they came up with a nice paint engine and at least sped the app up to Z2 levels, i'd consider it as a replacement for Z, for now it's more like an addendum to me.
Not to even mention that you wouldnt actually be able to import any of those meshes into a seperate program to render maps from, so you're stuck with zbrush's normal maps, and no ability to render ambocc from them, etc....
http://www.kolbyjukes.com/subpages/beelzebub.html
See?
I'm sure you understand it very easily as soon as you try the apps. It's actually a lot of fun which is not bad either!
in other words - who needs more than 640 kb of RAM?