Hey,the hipoly Ogre looks really cool[and funny :lol: his robes make him look like a chef:p ]
The normal mapped model looks good too…except for those seams…I hope those ppl fix ZMapper fast:rolleyes:
Thanks, Abe and Sriram. I’m gonna move on to other aspects of this guy for a while, as I’m getting very frustrated with ZB, and need a break from it.
I’ll start in on the Apron, and then go to the chainsaw, and grenade launcher. More updates as I get 'em done.
Alright, I think I got something that will be passable for a normal map. There’s still some artifacts going on, but I thin it looks a LOT better now.
At least I’m getting somewhere with this thing. 
I have a gig of ram too, pc 2100, and I cna get plenty of details into my mesh with z. just increase your max polies under preferences memory or something. I love that face in the high poly of the ogre character, but it seems you kinda quit there. remember you can hide and unhide your character, you can also export your model , break it down depending on the unwrap maps, and reimport and work on chunks at a time.
When i make a mod character, I’ll create a standard low poly mesh, unwrap it, detail it, then go back to level 1 in zbrush and reexport my low poly from that. I think your problem, other then your seams, is that your low poly doesn’t have the detailes that it needs, and it looks like a normal map on a 1000 poly character. so take your level one after detailing and export that. or even a level 2 and clean it up a bit.
also, abs and nipples 
Thanks for the comments, polyguns. I was able to get the 4.8 mil or so poly’s. He’s polygrouped, and hiding the other parts helped, but it’s still pretty slow, and unstable.
That is the level one after detailing. He’s already got 2300 tri’s, and I still have to make the apron, chainsaw, and grenade launcher, so I can’t really add anymore poly’s to him.
The abs I’m not worried about, the apron is gonna cover those anyway, the nipples I’ll get around to in a bit. I know he’s still got a ways to go before I can call him done, but all day yesterday, and most of today, I’ve been fighting with ZB over things like normal maps, and polycounts, and techy crap like that. Now that I have most of it worked out, I’ll be able to get in there, and really do some of the stuff I wanted to in the begining.
Can I see the low poly wire?
Here you go. Made from ZSpheres.
wow, you got that mesh from zspheres?
i always have a problem, kinda off topic, but whenever i make anything with zspheres, and get to the hands, i get such ugly seams in the hands its a horrible pain to try to solve them. any good tuts on making clean hands in zbrush?
now on topic, a few crits. Give the hands , the palms some meat, the fingers are masive, massive muscles, but weak looking palms. Make the hands thick and intimidating all over. its easy enough to do, sculpt it into the high and it will fix your low
your alot like me, monsters, bald and naked. Thats so much of what i do as well, and zbrush is perfect for it. but im trying to get that behind me and get into more technical less organic modeling, and one thing i learned when doing that is how to model for animation a bit better. Add some more polies for your knees, etc, and think about the shoulders. Don’t get too paranoid about polycouts, your well within your limitations, and just for ****s and giggles, try using auv tiles then generating your normal map. then try to import it. Maya always gives me nasty looking seams when looking at normal maps, so auv tiles are useless for renders, it max though that doesn’t occur. I want to know what it would be like ingame.
Imagine being able to use auv tiles, for games, and NEVER HAVING TO UNWRAP AGAIN MUAHAHAHAHAHA
Yeah, I got that from Zspehere’s. The hands have always been a problem for me with Zspheres. A couple pages back in this thread, I asked for help, and got 2 replies with some very good ways to solve the hand problem. It left me with too many poly’s in the hand area, but I tried to whittle them down in Max. I see now, I probably should have done wome more whittling.
About the knees, I totally forgot… My main problem areas for animation are the elbows, and shoulders, so I concetrated on them, and forgot all about the knees. Well, maybe this will give me a chance for better uv layout, better poly work, and design. It only took me about a day to come up with the design, tweak the lowpoly, and get the high-res almost done, so I doubt it’ll take much longer than that to get back to a respectable level.
Well, for now, how about a small update? This is the Ogre with a normal mapped apron. It’s not done, I still need to figure out how it connects to itself, and get the wrinkles to look more believable, but it’s almost there.
Anyway, enjoy.
Killer !
Now give him a hat and 2 knives 
As for the folds,I feel that adding more wrinkles and some “folds” near the border of the apron helps it look more believable
PS: Dont forget the big moustache
really nice man
hello Replica! great model…for the artifact, im nearly sure it comes from your uvs…I had the same problame with my uv and found out with the programmer at work responsible for the normal map part, that you Have to make you uvs having the same size (or close) to your actual geometry…you have grreat tool in max 8 that allows you to place them the best way (they become red or green depending how well placed they are)
it allows the normal infomation to point the right way when you have seeems …if two seperate part of your uv have different size, the normal will be screwed and youll have these artifact…You can smooth this problem in the engine using techniques (that i cant really explain as im just an artist
but if you work on your uvs it should improve it a great deal…
hope i helped…
Hey Abe, thanks! I’m learning all sorts of stuff about Max’s new uv options. I had no idea you could select only the inverted uv’s, or overlapping uv’s. That’s gonna help me out a lot. 
Would you happen to know what that tool that helps make your uv’s better suited for normal map creation? I think you said you use Maya, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know it.
I was able to fix a large amount of the problem with another member’s help. I upped the base model to the ZBC servers, and jbrophy was able to find that I needed to flip the red channel to get better results. 
Weird, but again, true. I gotta inform the mod lead about this stuff, so he doesn’t get the guys in game only to see they look like ass.
Sriram, Thanks for the comments. He had to shave off that big moustache, as it was making him easily recognisable. He barely got away from the cops in Mexico because of it, so it had to go.
Looking real mean bro, love
i used to be a max user but the prod i am working on (and the last one too) are made on maya so couldn’t use max for a long time…I started to be very interested in max when the guys from max came to demo max8…and i got cought by the pelt mapper …they came at a perfect time: we were experiencing the normal map seems/dark edje issue and new we needed a tool that would allow us to match edje uv length and edje geometry lenght…I was very exited …that’s the story
for the uv thing, you need to use the pelt mapper to unfload your uv (i dont know if you used it before but it’s ace and after that you have to use a tool in the uv option but cant remenber the name (we’ve got max 8 on another machine and the guy using it is off work (week end ) till tomorrow…as soon as he comes back ill give you its name!
this is a brilliant tool and would love to hacve this on maya 
if you manage to make proper uv and correct zmapper options for max8, u’ll gonna get exellent uvs, but u’ll always have a slightly visible dark edge on some seeems that can be corrected by one of your programer in your engine, basicly (if i understood) by averaging the normals of the vertices forming the seems…it works for us!
hope that will be of any use
Thanks Odhinn. I hope to do some more work on him today, maybe add some more details, like veins, or maybe even better anatomical details. I’m really getting into the sculpting of all that stuff now that I don’t have to worry about the polycount as much. 
Abe, thansk for the info. I’m gonna do some of my own research into that tool, and see if I can’t find out what it is (help file, here I come). I have used the Pelt mapper, in fact I almost always useit now, and love it. There’s still a few kinks to work out with my workflow on it, I have some inverted, and overlapping uv’s on this character. But it’s really cool to watch the uv’s get pulled and stretched till they work right. Honestly, I’ve been waiting for a decent advance in uv since I started 3d.
Anyway, I will find this option and try it. I was able to get some decent looking normal map results, so I can move on toother things when I have to. This guy’s almost done, just a few things more to do.
no probs! just as a note, IM VERY HAPPY
I had a problem with this new plug (zmapper) when i tryed to back normals on a new model with diefferent topology on it because is wasn’t place correctly but ive found the methode to do it right and now ive got a brilliant normal map for my character in 20 sec
Killer! I love to hear good news like that, man. I felt the same way with my Ogre, and all those ugly seams that almost disappear now that I’ve got some decent settings for ZMapper.
Good to hear, Abe. It’s always nice when a fellow artist gets his software to behave.
HEhe! and even better if it helps your effort in zbrush to be seen more precisly into the engine ;))
for the same sized normal map, the difference between the zmap version and the maya sampler is just scary…and so much faster! i love zbrush! big applause to those genius from pixologic :))
No kidding, I love ZBrush (even with some of it’s flaws). I really don’t think I could make the kinda of models I do without it. I can’t stand pushing/pulling verts to model a character, especially when there’s something like ZB around.
Anyway, that little tool in Max wouldn’t happen to be called Show Edge Distorion, would it? I found that option, and was blown away by the amount of distortion on my uv’s. I had no idea. I thought they looked good, but man, there was a lot of distortion in ALL of the uv chunks. Unreal…
Looks like I got a lot of work to do to fix those, so wish me luck.