ZBrushCentral

Oona Witchmasker WIP

I’m undertaking my most complicated ZBrush project to date and thought I’d share my WIP along with asking for advice and opinions along the way.

I discovered the incredible concept work of Sean Andrew Murray a few weeks ago and gravitated toward this character. He gave me permission to do a 3d sculpt and I’m using this as a test bed to eventually bring into Modo to do my turntable render.

A few things I’m noticing already:

  1. At 27 subtools just for the mask, I’m already hitting 11.186 million(!) TotalPoints. My machine (an early 2008 Mac Pro w/12GB Ram) is holding up ok, but it’s starting to take a long time saving the file and mirroring subtools. I did discover that lowering the subdivisions for all the subtools before performing the needed mirroring seemed to help speed things up.

  2. How do people generally go about managing a character this detailed and keeping the workflow reasonable? Do you treat section separately and append them later? I’m attempting to do as much pre-planning before I bring in components to ZBrush. I’m using Maya to create my base meshes and setting crease edges before GoZ-ing stuff over. I just can’t see carrying all of the geometry for this character inside a single ZBrush document. Thoughts? Workarounds? Workflows?

  3. I’ve already learned a great deal just with the mask portion. I’m (finally) utilizing layers by building up my levels of detail - i.e., Layer 1 is wood grain, followed by Layer 2 “dinged edges” and Layer 3 “scratches” for each subtool. Is it typical to carry this history for each subtool, or, is it wiser to bake all the layers once everything is finalized?

  4. After adding this level of detail, will I need to do a retopology pass for every subtool before generating my displacement and texture maps? Or, can I simply bump down to Level 1, generate the maps and use the base geo I had originally prior to importing into ZBrush? I know there are different workflows for this depending on whether the piece will end up in a game engine VS a commercial or film project. I don’t currently plan on animating the character - I only wish to generate a hi-res turntable.

Lots of things to learn here. I look forward to hearing your experiences when undertaking a more complicated piece and how best to proceed.

Thanks for following along!

-Steve

Attachments

Oona_Witchmasker_Web-2.jpg

Maya_baseMesh.jpg

mask_WIP-2.jpg

great start for sure … i really like the concept " reminds me of Crash the video game :smiley:

Hi Steve,

Just a comment about your millions of polygons: just on the basemesh, how many polygons just for the bevel that you added on your mesh to “manage” the smoothing?
You could have avoiding it by disabling the Smt (Smooth) option near the Divide button in Tool >> Geometry for the couple of first subd levels. The reslt is adding polygons without visually smoothing your shape.

Another thing I try to do when I’m creating a base mesh (or a retopology), is that I try to compute how many polygons must be my base mesh to have an optimized workflow. I know that on my computer, I’m fine when a SubTool is at 20 millions of polys. Then my base mesh must be a factor of 4 to this value:
20 000 000 / 4 = 5 000 000 / 4 = 1 250 000 /4 = 312 500 / 4 = 78 000 / 4 = 19500 / 4 = 4900 / 4 = 1200 -I approximate some values.

Then I’m always trying to have a base mesh which is very close to 1200, 5000 or 20000 to be able to work smoothly. And I know that these values can be a little bit lower as in fact, I can work almost up to 30 millions. But I avoid values which could make the addition of an extra Subdiv level impossible because I would reach the max value (like 8 500 polygons which would go up to 9 750 000 polys… but not the next level which is 39 millions… and then I’m losing potentially 11 millions+ polys that I could have added to my model to reach my real limit of 20 millions…

For your 4th question, if your goal is a final high resolution rendering, just keep your current base mesh, no need to redo a retopology. In a way, you can even do a decimation of your final model and is the raw generated topology to do your render without dealing with maps (just don’t forget to enable the UVs in Decimation Master).

D’oh! I hope I didn’t just make my life more complicated already with just the mask?

This is great advice!

I’m turning in for the night, but will definitely re-evaluate my base meshes as I move forward. I’ll also do an experiment with some of the mask pieces and see about bringing those beveled edges down. Now that I think about it, they were bunched up quite a bit as I was using the Trim Dynamic brush to flatten 'em out.

Thanks again,

-Steve

Great start on the mask.
I would certainly collapse your layers once you’re happy with them, as retaining them will bloat the file size. I would also recommend ensuring that all your subtools are at their lowest sdiv level when you save the tool as this will aid greatly with save/load times.
Looking forward to following your progress.

very nice start man

Got a little bit of time in this morning and decided to get the base figure in quickly to block out proportions. I’m using the supplied Nickz_HumanMale mesh as my base. I just watched Joseph Drust’s webinar via ZBrush Workshops and picked up some great tips. I did some basic posing with the transpose tools, then brought it into Maya to line up and work out proportions with the mask. I’ll be doing some rearranging of subtools for the mask. I wish ZBrush had a notion of moving grouped subTools - guess I’ll have to delve into subTool master for this one?

EDIT I was looking in the wrong place. What I needed was Transpose Master! That did the trick, now all my pieces are in their proper world space and I’m going to get those figures wrapped around the staff next.

figure_proportions.jpg

A rule to keep in mind, as much as possible when you are creating a base mesh which will be sculpted (when possible of course): keeping the mesh density as much constant as possible, polygons as much square as possible (width is in ratio of factor 2 or 3 to the height (or the opposite)).

It makes the sculpting more consistent and avoid you adding an extra subdivision level of smoothing just because you didn’t added few extra loops on your base mesh. Your spear is a good example of what you need to avoid if you need to create fine details on it :slight_smile:

I added some notes on your image if you don’t mind

critics.jpg

Thanks for the advice! I found myself going back to Maya and adding/adjusting my edge loops for better quad spread.

So, I’ve gotten some time in here and there over the past few weeks in-between paying gigs. Been having fun exploring some texture painting techniques on the shoulder pads this evening. I’m finding mask by cavity to be an amazing way to get that dry-brush effect. Using layers is helping too.

I need to return to some paying work for the next week, so hope to pick away at more of the other accessories when I get a chance.

Keep the comments and crits coming, thanks!

05012013_WIP-2.jpg05012013_WIP.jpgupperShoulderPad.jpg

I also forgot one advice when it comes to work with mesh which have some hard edges: depending of the shape you can always subdivide it several times without having the “Smt” mode enable (just on the right of the Divide button) and then, after a couple of new subdivision, enabeling it again: it will then smooth slightly your model and create bevel on hard edges.