Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Something little says a lot:

Well, this isn't much to show for a post, but the significance is too great to not mention. Basically, with these little crappy attached images, I have managed to confirm that my new pipeline is going to work! I will now be rapidly detailing my model in Zbrush and rather than re-topologizing the Zbrush model, unwrapping the model, then going back into Zbrush and detailing the new topology, I will simply detail the base mesh in Zbrush, retopologize in 3D studio max and bake the high-res detail onto the low-res mesh using xNormal. The following images are examples of this process and my quick little experiment:


This image is the 'low-res, high-res' model consisting of two zbrushed spheres at about 150,000 tris used for retopologizing in max. The actual 'high-res' model used for the baking was ~700,000 tris (I didn't bother to take a picture of that).


This is the low-res 'game-ready' model. As you can see, I didn't spend much time on it. The goal was to make sure I could bake a multi-mesh onto a unified mesh. The test succeeded.

All engines are go!

2 comments:

  1. Nice pipeline. So what is the advantage of using xNormal over using Zmapper?

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  2. xNormal has the ability to bake normals on a completely separate mesh. In addition, the high-res mesh can be a multi-mesh while the low-res cage can be a unified mesh. This is great because it enables you to paint high-res details onto a mesh with no UV's, but then bake that mesh's details onto your optimized game model.

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