Texturing and UVing a high poly model in Maya

#1

Hi community - probably a newbie question here.

So I am fairly OK with the make high poly > make low poly > bake out maps > texture > etc etc.

Now I have recently invested in a fairly beefy render machine and would like to put it to good use so I am thinking that I will just model high-poly and straight texture/paint that. Can someone tell me if I am wasting my time and whether it is better to continue with old method of high poly / low poly?

If high-poly texturing isn’t a waste of time what would be the best way around it. Should I smooth the mesh in maya with the ‘3’ key or actually perform the smooth command? Should I texture with photoshop etc? Or is it best to paint straight on top of high poly meshes with zbrush/mudbox.

thanks very much

#2

Depends what you mean by high-poly: 50,000faces? 4million faces?

Personally I always like to UV at as low a polycount as is possible, depending on the workflow.

You can always just UV your lowest level mesh and export the second or third level from Zbrush with propogated UVs. I would advise against UVunwrapping meshes with 10’s of 1000’s of faces, even with a high-end machine. Can be a nightmare.

#3

Thanks for the reply. I was talking 500,000 and above really, probably over a million in fact. I was thinking about when I’m in Maya and not necessarily zbrush. Is it best to create a low-poly and and then use maps? Or can I paint or uvmap and texture directly with a high poly model.

#4

Why would you ever need to UV a 1mill+ mesh? Your computer probably couldn’t handle it for starters. And even if it could, it would be nightmarishly sluggish. Just UV the lowest level mesh and smooth it using Sub-D’s in Maya. Are you talking about a character or vehicle or what?

#5

Thank you that’s helpful information.

I thought sub d’s had been removed from maya 2014. Is it best to use the smooth preview or or use the polygon smooth option under mesh.

Thank you

#6

Not too sure as I’m a 3dsMax user, but as far as I know smooth preview is similar to turbosmooth modifier in Max. The mesh gets smoothed based on the sub-D algorithm, but isn’t baked into the mesh. In Max I would collapse the modifier stack to bake smoothing. You would have to check the Maya helpfile to determine the relevant terminology. Just don’t get it confused with face smoothing(which is a non-sub-D poly smoothing based on face normals)

#7

Thanks I thnk I got it now. I can model in low poly in maya, using the smooth mesh preview to give me an idea of what the high poly mesh will look like (without baking it in). I can then unwrap the low poly version convert my meshes to high-poly via the baked in smooth mesh command and then texture away.

The opposite obviosuly applies for low poly game characters! Model the high-poly, model the low poly - bake maps etc and transfer…

#8

That’s it mate. The only thing regarding UVs that you have to worry about is that the UV co-ordinates will change slightly when you smooth the mesh which may lead to texture artifacts/stretching. Again, I’m a Max user so I don’t know the methods in Maya to minimise this issue.