Hey Rep this is looking real sweet. The armour looks great. Could you just go over your method of putting things together in zbrush again please. Also looking forward to your retopology steps.
Thanks, eboy. Not exactly sure what you’re looking for, about putting things together in ZB. Could you clarify that a bit?
Ahh sorry. Like the way you put together the model and the armour/equip parts in zbrush from 3ds max. Or maybe I’ve completely missed the point somewhere 
Also I tried abe_Tamazir’s method of keeping the mesh in max (he does this in maya) as seperate parts and then exporting to zbrush so that you have the different polygroups for easier detailing. This all works fine until you start sub-dividing and the different parts start to pull away from each other. Is there an easier or certain way of doing this? Do you usually just work on the whole mesh at once Rep?
edit nm I’m such an ass. I just hit crease and my problems are sorted with the edges pulling away.
Ah, yeah, I don’t put new meshes onto the old ztool. I’ve never gotten it to work without something going to ****. I just Export the high res to max, select all the meshes, export to zb, edit them, export the high res, open the older ztool, and import the changes onto the ztool.
Glad you got it sorted out, though. I’m starting the rest of the fifth pass now, so it shouldn’t be too much longer till the low poly stuff starts.
Here’s a shot of him in all his 1.5 million poly glory, so far. Still needs touch up, and another division for skin textures. Not sure if I’ll be able to get that division, so I might have to put all the skin stuff into a bump map, we’ll see.
Again, this pass is just to tighten everything up, and make it look a bit more crisp. And I think he’s getting there. There’s still some blobby areas that need fixing, and some areas without enough detail, but again, those’ll get fixed by the time this pass is done.
I’m generally happy with him, but I’ll continue to work the mesh just to see what else happens with him.
Oh, and just so you know, I tried to import this mesh on top of the old ztool, and ZB screwed the pooch. When I lower the div levels, it explodes, and there’s no going back. When try, it crashes on me. I got an idea something went bug-**** while exporting, so I’ll export from max, and see if that fixes it. Heres hoping. 
When your talking about exporting the high res to max, what size polygon count are you usually talking about with your models? I remember you saying something about 2 million. Doesn’t your max seriously chug along when your trying to put the armour parts on? And once your back in zbrush and you start sub-dividing again for the equip parts won’t that also divide your already modelled character mesh or do you keep this hidden while dividing? Also I’m not sure how you mean export the new ztool and then import the parts back onto the older ztool.
Sorry for being a bit clueless, although I am making serious headway with zbrush these days and should hopefully have myself a pretty sexy looking character soon.
HAhahaa, don’t worry about it, man, this kinda thing can be confusing, to say the least. I’ll try to explain this a little better, step by step.
You have your original ztool you’ve been working on for a while. You open that ztool, and export the highest division, which usually isn’t that much yet, as you should only be on about pass 4-5, to an obj. Open it in max, and it should be ok, cause you’re not gonna be floating around in Max very long. All you wanna do is be able to select your high res mesh, AND your accessories for export. Export it all, and go back to ZB. You save the ztool you’ve got open, then clear your canvas. I normally just select a zsphere, tell ZB yeah, I wanna switch, then draw one zsphere in the canvas, and undo twice. I’m sure there’s easier ways, but I just don’t care.
Now that everything is clear, import the obj you just exported from Max with all the meshes present. This seems to be the part that is kinda tripping you up, you DO NOT DIVIDE THE MESH. All the poly’s you need are already there, all you gotta do is tweak them according to the accessories. Dividing in this stage a bad idea, and I’ll explain why in just a second.
Once you’re done with those edits, hide everything but the high res mesh that made up your previous ztool. Export just that mesh. Then again, clear your canvas, and this time, open up that ztool you were working on before you did all this import/export horse flop. Go to the highest dvision, and import the mesh you exported previously. Since the polycount, and uv’s are exactly the same, the changes you made will transfer to the ztool.
If you divide the mesh with the accessories on it, the polycount will not match up, and it won’t work. Now that it’s imported, and the changes are there, you can continue to tweak those changes, and divide until your computer ****s on you.
I hope that makes sense now, cause that’s a lot of typing. 
If not, we can try and pin point the parts you’re still having problems with, and figure it out. By the way, I got my mesh to work in ZB again, by exporting from Max, so I was right, about something screwing up during export. Don’t know why it would be ok in Max, though…
Hey Rep cheers buddy. I understand exactly what your talking about now and it sounds like a good method. The only part I have a question about is the last bit where you hide everything but the mesh you were working on in your previous ztool. I take it you also have to hide the character mesh, export again so you can take the editted equipement parts back to max?
Ah! I knew I was forgetting something! You don’t edit the extra stuff in ZB, it’s just a guide to show you exactly where you need to edit the creature/character mesh you’re working on. The accessories either get individual ZB love, or are completely done in Max. The blanket, and pockets on my Blade Worm were given individual attention in ZB, and aren’t that high res. Not even 100k poly’s, I don’t think. A lot of the edginess can be removed in your 3d package of choice, by adding a simple smooth to it, no iterations, just meshsmooth.
Awesome stuff Rep, thanks for the help. Think I’m gonna call it a night here and actually get round to detailing my guy tomorrow. Think I’m gonna keep this model as a higher res one and go for some displacement aswell as normal mapping and any other map that makes animation models look very nice. All for some good practice ofcourse. My next model will be a game one
Sounds killer, bro, looking forward to it. 
Getting close to having this fifth pass done. I could make this a high res model, since I did the uv’s on the low version, and can render the displacement map in ZB. It wouldn’t be a very good model, but it would be a high res one. 
The fifth pass is pretty much done, and it’s time to start in on the low poly stuff. I’ll be using the 300k poly mesh, cause it’s all around easier.
The same rules I gave in the polyboost part of this walkthrough apply, and I’ll be using the same tools. This time, however, I’ll be making a sort of shell around the mid res mesh.
Keeping animation, and sillhouette in mind, I start placing down geometry on the surface of the mesh. The things that really matter on low poly modeling is animation, sillhouette, and edgeflow. A lot of people new to low poly modeling want to include everything in the mesh. They want to add all the belts, all the buckles, all of everything, and that’s not the way it works. Doing that you end up with too many polys, and all the little details that have no reason to be there look like crap because of it. A quick example is the belts on this guy. There wll likely be no low poly version of them, the normal map will take care of them. That is what it’s there for.
Got the low poly started now, and took a quick screenie of hot it looks in begining. I know, I know it’s wrong right now, cause the saddle and armor are not represented in the low poly yet, but they will be.
If at all possble, keeping the whole thing as one mesh is a great idea. It helps when making normal maps, as the projections don’t overlap, and cause funkiness. It also keeps the polycount low, and helps when animating, as there’s less of a chance of things interpentrating while in motion.
More to come as I think of it, and work on it.
Hey rep thanks a lot for the lighter bg renders… 
. These are much better for me.
Nice to see the updates too its coming out gr8, assuming that u are working on the body lowpoly first I guess that the saddle, accessories and the armor will bein a seperate low poly mesh. Jus had one comment from myside… personally I jus feel that the saddle and the cloth below it can use some more Zbrush pass to it, as it takes references from a old time saddle, I can hav some more of stitches and creases, leather cloth texture, some loose straps comming out etc, jus a personal preference as I feel it will bring out more to the character… got some interesting images that I found on google if havent already seen them :lol:
http://www.clearwatermuseum.org/images/OldSaddle1b.jpg
http://www.txranger.com/images/Ranchpictures/Saddle%20picture.jpg
http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/659763/2/istockphoto_659763_old_child_s_saddle.jpg
http://www.asianart.com/mongolia/saddle.jpg
http://www.saddles-tack.com/timer.jpg
http://www.silverrosesaddle.com/html/old%20wall%20hangers.jpg
http://julia.hanovercomputer.com/firearms/mar05/catalog/images\53798.jpg
Waiting for updates
Hey, hey smoothy. It is looking like the armor and things might need to be seperate pieces, actually. I’m not sure, though, I might go ahead and make the saddle part of the main body, but that armor… We’ll see.
As for the saddle, I was gonna do more with it, and I will, but while looking for images on google, I got sidetracked by weird picture that lead to a site called patently ridiculous. The picture was a saddle for kids, that parents would wear. I couldn’t stop looking at some of those bizarre inventions that actually hold patents… I forgot about the saddle after that.
It’ll get attention though, I’m really just starting the low poly cause it seems the appopriate time. About the stitching and all that, that’s texture stuff, not modeling. Bleieve me, it’s MUCH easier to paint that kinda **** in photoshop, and normal map that, than it is to go in and try and sculpt it.
On the progress of the low poly, I’ve got the body done, and he’s clocking in at about 4800 poly’s so far before final clean up. And I found that the topology on the arms from the zsphere base wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. The shoulders needed some clean up, and there was a bit of work to do, but not as bad as having to make the entire thing again. Saved me a buttload of time.
I’ll post more tomorrow.
After I did some work on the saddle, it became obvious that he was lacking an important bit of detail that mounts need. A harness, and reins. A rider wouldn’t be able to this dude without one, so he has one now. Needs a little bit of detail work, but it’s there.
This is the equivelant of the fifth pass in ZB, only in Max. Making sure everything’s as tight as you can get it, so a lot of nit-picking is necessary. Just a little more to go, and the high res will be done.
The low poly body is just about finished as well, still gotta do the armor, and all that stuff. And I gotta see about extruding the saddle from the body, to keep it one piece.
[attach=45577]BladeWorm-Max_07.jpg[/attach]
Here’s what I’ve got for the low poly right now. Still needs work, like adding the reins, and blanket pack on his back. But it’s sitting at 5590 tri’s right now, which isn’t bad at all.
More updates later.
Thanks to the awesome info provided to me by, safe05, I got my video down to 13mb’s instead of 122mb’s. I’ll provide that vid as soon as I can, but just remember that it’s only the begining of the first pass, so not a lot of sexy sculpting going on.
Since it’s pretty far into the project now, I’ll see about making vids for my next model, to make up for the ones missing here. I am sorry I couldn’t get the vids to you guys that I wanted to, but I figured writing the tut, and getting it done without too many breaks would be better than waiting for a week or so to get a couple of vids. I’ll try for next time, though.
I’m currently doing the uv’s for the low poly version. The body uv’s are just about done, and the rest shouldn’t take too long. I’ll post what I have when I’m done with them.
that’s some comitment Rep! i’m sure im not talking only for myself when i say that we really appreciate those efforts man!
ill be on a work trip to canada for few days so i wont be posting much but looking forward to the final tut when ill be back next week
Thanks, Abe, it just drives me nuts when I wanna do something for people, and it ends up, I can’t deliver like I wanted. Maybe that’s why I’ve never missed a deadline Have fun on your trip, bro. I’ve never been to canada, in fact I’ve never left the states, and even here the farthes I’ve gone is Chicago for 2 whole days.
I THINK the uv’s are done, I packed them as tight as I could, keeping in mind how the normal maps have to have space between the uv chunks to render right. I managed to get all of the low poly stuff in there, and we’ll see how good the normal map looks after it’s rendered.
I’ll put my normal map rendering settings on here for people to use, or to give me hints. Shouldn’t be much longer before the texturing starts.
Even though, apparently, no one’s watching, I gotta say, the normal mapping would likely be done by now, if Max would stop crashing!!!
I’m taking it into Max 9 for normal mapping, 9 is much better at handling poly’s, so I’ll just map it there, and export back to good ol’ max 8.