Confused about character workflow for still shot...

#1

Hey all -

Trying to figure out a few important things/workflow that I need to do in order to achieve what I’m going for.

I’m making a couple of stylized characters for a posed scene still shot. Both characters will be sitting on a bench.

So far I have done my block outs in Maya and creased all the edges I want creased (to keep geo even for Zbrush). Now here is where I’m confused since I don’t usually work in Zbrush…should I unwrap my block out mesh before importing into Zbrush to do more fine sculpting? Or once I do the fine sculpting in Zbrush, should I import back to Maya and do my UV unwrapping there?

I see people making normal maps out of their sculpts and just using those on the low poly model. Should I do this? I am not animating…but I will be rigging as these characters will be posed.

Any help would be awesome. Thank you!

#2

You could re-use your “base mesh” as the final mesh. However, if you introduce too much stretching in your geometry (making surface changes that don’t match the original silhouette anymore) you will have a wonky looking model as well as stretched uv’s. If you’re not gonna make extreme changes to the mesh, then yes it is a valid workflow.

Also unwrapping the base mesh before going into zbrush is a good way of hiding parts of the model with Zbrush’s UV groups.