Hey guys, I hope everybody is doing well on the forums today.
I’m having some Zbrush/Maya pipeline issues that I need some help with.
I’m trying to recreate the dragon from game of thrones and I keep facing topology errors when i try to remesh it.
Here’s the process that I followed:
1.ZSpheres to create the model.
2.Basic shaping of the polymesh (at this point I might stretch the polygons to an extreme so I can get the shape that I like).
3.QRemesh the model to fix the stretched polygons before I move on to a higher SubD.
This is where I’m facing a lot of problems.
First problem is that the fingers start disappearing, I try to mask the out before I qremesh but then I face another problem that the mesh’s topology doesn’t match the fingers and vice versa and you can usually tell they don’t fit together just by looking at it.
After qremeshing I project all to a clone of the original model and SubD and reproject all. This works well but again I face issues with the edges of the fingers and tail and teeth where they don’t have enough topology from the previous step and I end up with a big tri as a finger.
So I ended up qremeshing different parts of the same body at different times using masks and reprojecting using masks as well. It’s a very messy process at the end and the results aren’t that great, certainly not professional level.
This is the point where I started adding in the wings and the horns on his back and realized that it’s not a unified mesh in Maya and I might have problems when it come to rigging and animating the model. Poly’s cutting into each other is not sexy. So thought about the only way I know to merge subtools seamlessly in Zbrush, DynaMesh.
DynaMesh pipeline:
1.Use Dynamesh to create the model.
2.Sculpt and add details, seamlessly merge different parts of the model into a single mesh.
By this point the dragon looks great and perfect but it’s usually has millions of poly’s and it’s not animation friendly or usable in a game engine and because I used DynaMesh I don’t have a low poly version of the model anymore to bake the details on in Maya.
I end up using qremesher to cut the poly’s in half and repeat the process to get to the poly count that I like and even with the use of the QRemesher brush to guide the topology I end up with the same problems as the first process, tri fingers.
So what I’m asking for is, Has anyone perfected a pipeline to create high detailed low poly models using Maya and ZBrush that can be used for rigging and animation in both film and game environments?