Comentarios de profesionales sobre su workflow

Tim Appleby
For more work by this artist please visit:
http://badpolygon.com/

[b]Workflow de un game charcter:
[/b]
Can you briefly describe your usual pipeline for creating normal mapped characters and the general challenges the job presents? I start off working in Max, creating rough low poly meshes for sculpting on in Zbrush. Often I do a quick concept sculpt to help determine the form of the model and use this as a reference for my real detailed sculpt. I still like to do my hard surfaced modelling in Max but tend to do as much organic modelling in sculpting packages as possible.

After the high poly work is done, I often run it through polygon reduction tools beforeimporting it to Max to create the low poly around. I try and reuse low poly meshes as much as possible, but also use the draw tools available in Polyboost to create my low poly mesh directly on the surface of the high. Normal mapping in Max is a piece of cake and I’d bake an ambient occlusion there and also a basic diffuse map too.

I think the real challenge with normal maps is ensuring that your lighting and specular show them off effectively. As games and technology continue to become increasingly complex, the number of dependent factors increases exponentially. Character artists have to rely on either being able to control the lighting that will affect their characters or being informed very early on in the project of what their expectations should be.

The artist can create the most fantastic piece of artwork in isolation, however, if it’s not created with knowledge of how it will be used and in what kind of conditions, then it certainly won’t live up to its full potential when finally revealed in a game.

[aaa3d]

hey dagoned,

every character modeller here at blur has slightly differing approaches to tackling our characters. however there are a few common points that we all go through.

here at blur, remember that all our characters are going to be animated so things like good edge flow or topology is very very important. part of our job is to make sure all our characters make the riggers and animators happy.

generally we first quickly build a polygon model that has a minimal of surface detail to define the proportions of the character. this is generally the first point of approval with the cg supervisor. i personally prefer to use 3dsmax with polyboost but some of the guys here perfer to use xsi to do their poly modelling.

after we've gotten approval for proportions we start detailing the surface with poly modelling. it is generally here that i start figuring out what areas will be zbrushed. in my process i generally try to hit the silhouettes with my poly modelling, then do the uv's then do my zbrushing and generate either normal maps or displacement maps depending on whether we're gonna use displacement or not. at this point its also very important to pay attention to topology to make sure everything that's gonna be deformed (joints) have enough detail and good edge flow. after this is done there is another pass of approval for the topology.

finally we make our textures and shaders. i think all of us use photoshop to make our textures, i think quite a few of us also use bodypaint 3d to fix our seams and we generally use mental ray to render so we build our shaders for mental ray.

that's a general overview of how we approach our characters. its a bit different for every character modeller here. the thing is that here at blur we still very much emphasize a good poly model. our characters aren't made for a nice single still render, they have to move around a lot. so its very important to have a good poly model that will hold up well when its deformed.

there are some variants of course depending on the character and the project and whether we are gonna use displacement rendering. in one recent project we did, what i did first was to take a very simple base man character and sculpt it to the general proportions and get proportional approval. then i used polyboost's retopology tools to build a new cage with good topology on top of my sculpt, paying attention especially to the joints like shoulders, knees and face etc. then i did uv's on the model and took that new poly model and resculpted the character with much more detail. then i generated a displacement map and finally textured it with photoshop and bodypaint and built shaders for it.

zbrush is an excellent tool in our toolbox but it certainly isn't the only one. off the top of my head in our character pipe here we use 3dsmax, xsi, deep uv, zbrush, mudbox, bodypaint, photoshop, and some others i'm sure i'm not thinking of right now.

hope that helps and thanks to everyone for their kind words regarding our work on warhammer.