ZBrushCentral

123d Catch Zbrush workflow for human

Hi!

I have some experience with architecture modeling but non with sculpting.
my goal is to make a ready to use game character from a real life person.
I have just discovered the software 123d catch from autodesk and i made a scantest of my face. It turned out surpriseingly well. The mesh itself is very noisy/bumpy and has a very high polycount with awful topology. The model looks real only becouse of the texture but the mesh gives a very good base for modeling, with excellent proportions.

has anyone tried to make a (game) character based on 123d catch scan?
what could be a good workflow?

I’ve used it before (though it was called photofly or something similar at the time). My results weren’t as good as I’ve seen others make, but I was stuck with a basic camera and limited photos at the time (with outdoor lighting to boot). I imagine with a good camera and a few minutes in a studio, you’d be able to get quite the result.

For the most part you’d just need to import your resulting model, and retopologize it. When I did it I aimed to shrinkwrap an existing mesh on top and so I did it externally in Softimage, but if you were going to retopologize from scratch you can get away with doing it all in zbrush too. You’ll probably want to slap it onto a body as well if you’re aiming to make a full character, unless you’re going to have clothes cover the neck seam. That would give you a nice edgeflow and good proportions from the start (along with the chance to fix any errors that it might generate - mine had quite a few holes in the back of the head along with pieces of the sky being captured in the model). So from there you can just subdivide and start to sculpt in any surface details that it might not have been captured. All the photos you’ve taken would make great reference for this part as well. Also add in things that might have been missed (teeth, etc).

You can choose if you’d want to transfer 123D’s generated texture over to your new retopologized model, if you’d rather clear it out and do your own version using Zapplink and all the photo’s you’ve taken, or if you’d want to polypaint the skin yourself.