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Question for Game Modelers in Zbrush: Clothes?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello all,

I’ve been working for the past semester working mostly with FMV style models made for Maya pre-rendered Maya shorts etc. in class. I’ve also had some experience doing simple, low-poly models for use in various game engines.

But I’m coming up against a wall trying to figure out how to model a human character that would be appropriate for an engine somewhere between the Panda3D engine, and the Source engine.

All of the modeling tutorials that I can find show modeling humans and humanoids as nude, and adding clothes in as a separate mesh overtop of the base (using the Zbrush mesh-extract, or something similar).

My end-goal is going to be a fairly stylized girl in a tank-top, and I’m getting down enough in detail that I need to know whether or not it would be best to make the model with the Tanktop “Fused” to her, or keep the model as a separate clothing mesh to go overtop of a base-mesh.

I’d really appreciate a bit of advice on how best to tackle this from someone who’s had more experience modeling/modding for an engine. :smiley:

#2

Do you want her to take the top off? If so, model it separately. If not, not. That is all there is to it. To make a separate mesh the extract tool works ok, or better yet export the finished girl to another app and import a tanktop shaped version cutout on top of her.

If you make them separate you have to skin them both to the skeleton, but if you have maya there is a feature to use the skin from the base mesh on the new mesh (with some editing).

#3

Thanks for the advice. :slight_smile:

Yeah, I guess I am looking for more of an “in-general” sense for good modeling practices when I ask this.

I am actually helping my professor build a tutorial (that I’ll definitely post here), about getting a good workflow for building a character model for use in a game engine working between Maya and Zbrush. If I were doing this for a specific project, I’d probably leave the tanktop attached, but I was wondering if it was “proper form” for next gen to keep the base-mesh and clothing meshes separate.

Thanks again for the reply. For my purposes I think I’ll be good leaving all of the clothing attached as part of the base model.

#4

For me, the modelling follows what animation we need to do with the it. If the character is always wearing that same costume for the production shots, modeling the character & costume all in one go is the usual practice. I will also often generate a low-res proxy for the animators to work with which fills the same space, but with as low a poly-count as I can get away with.

If the character is going to go through multiple costume changes, none of which are on camera, then I will often just gin up models of that same character, with jointing for the same rig. No sense in going to devise elaborate costumes as seperate models if they’re never going to be used as seperate models.

I also tend to do heads and bodies seperatey and fuse them into the same single mesh when needed. This lets us work with heads alone (for close-ups) without toting the computing weight of full bodies. Simple clothing elements, such as shirt or jacket often covers up the face that the character has been de-capitatied for close-up work.

In general the mantra is: “If the audience never sees it, don’t model it.”

-K