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:
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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.
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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?
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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?
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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