What are you Working on?

Just a thread im making up for people can show there creations that they used VoidWorld to help create, in similar vain to the thread of the same title on the polycount forum.

you can put anything here WIP's, or completed works, individual models or characters or whole scenes and games just as long as Voidworld was used in the workflow of the creation of this content.

Radnom flame tower concept (right click for full size):

Radnom flame tower concept (right click for full size):

looks pretty sweet, are you going to do a game res and texture this thing up at somepoint, or your just making it for rendering?

thanks Passerby. For now it was just sketch concept for game Anomaly warzone eartch of flame tower. I has bad topology so no uv mapping. I was more about basic shape.
Here is one more - hipoly zbrush and then lowpoly in vw:



Lowpoly was done not by edge  retopo, but more by 'eyeballing' verts positons. Fortunately after decimation in hipoly and bringing it into vw it was quite smooth with 23 sept update.

ah cool so were you working on Anomaly or doing that for practice/ fan art?

cause if you are working on it i love the concept of that game picked it up a while ago but still havent had a chance to play yet but it looks great.

Great work! Love the textures on that tire. May I ask what your imported Zbrush polycount was?

Wheel poly was 52k, after strong decimation.
Note that front tire text is tire texture I downloaded for free. So I just projected it in zbrush.

Regardless where you got the texture from, it looks nice!

So I didn't do any of this in VoidWorld, But I would have liked to. I would love for VoidWorld to be solid enough to make the base mesh in, then retopologize a fairly dense mesh from Zbrush. It's almost to that point, and I'm very excited. I'm trying to help Kun as much as I can with the speed issue. In the meantime, I did this in Silo and Zbrush.

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161630-A-Dragon-named-Zsar

Cheers,
-ShaneO

Hey, I love the Dragon, but I'm curious about the n-gons, did you do those in Silo, and then they worked ok, in ZBrush for the hi-dense sculpt etc..??  or is this something that Zbrush did while painting, sculpting etc??  Just wondering because, I spend most of my time on the models, trying to erase the ngons in my modes, even triangles now, so that I can sculpt it in 3DCoat, and Blacksmith3D, sculptris, cb-model pro without it having wierd spikes pointing up everywhere, when sub-divided..  This is actually one of the main things slowing up the next tutorial of the head, doing the nose etc.. because when cutting and retopo'ing the nose, you end up with some triangles at the end of the loops on the back of the head, and I'm trying to figure out an easy and quick way to teach the newbs how to add the nose geometry, yet still keep the triangles out of the mesh, so they don't have to watch me, cut, delete, cut delete etc.. for a whole tutorial.. heehhe..

Kind of silly since in the end the whole model ends up as triangles when I export it for the game..

Nice very nice model though, keep up the good work, and would love to see this or something similar in VW in the near future.. ;')

StOrM3

Thanks Storm! I try to avoid Ngons as much as possible, but sometimes I leave them in for no good reason other than laziness. Zbrush will turn everything into quads as soon as you subdivide one level, but you are right, it tends to make poles, so try to avoid them.

A good rule of thumb is to go 100% quads for sculpting, and do whatever you want for in-game meshes. In the end, I'll just transfer the maps anyway. I rarely use my level 1 sub-d as my in-game base mesh. So far, Maya's Transfer maps has been the best solution for getting the best results believe it or not. I've tested most of them (Maya, Max, Xnormal, Zbrush, Mudbox, ext) I have yet to test 3DCoat or XSI. Hopefully one day Kun will have a chance to put map baking into Void World. 

im thinking of instead of implementing map baking and viewport shader and all of that just keep pushing VW farther in modeling, and really try to push it far in integration, so it can easily be used with other tools like xnormal, zbrush, etc.

since doing map baking in it's self is a lot of work and it will take a very long time for it to get as advanced as xnormal or maya's transfer maps. and once that is done you still need to get a viewport shader that can display the normal maps in the viewport, which is a lot of work especially if your going to try and support HLSL or CGFX shaders.

so why not just work on integration, like add GOZ, than add support for xNormal's SBM format so you can make the cage in VW and export everything out as a SBM to xnormal.

not sure if everyone thinks the same, since i do use VW differently than most, right now Maya sits at the center of my workflow, than i do all my modeling in VW, and make base meshes in VW if sculpting in zbrush. than bring things back to maya for UV's and setup up my HP and LP and cage for export to xNormal, and once baked i usually use Maya again with the HLSL Xoliulshader, for doing my materials and texturing, than finally using maya for my export to the game engine of choice since Maya has FBX support.


Guess what im trying to say is instead of making VW do everything it should do 1 thing Really well and make it easy to move your models to other applications to do the rest.

You know what? I totally agree! I say keep on streamlining the modeling aspect to make VW the best program for modeling there is... it's just about there.

That being said, VW already has a link with 3DCoat, which is huge. I use 3DCoat for retop, UVs, and texturing. I have yet to try 3DCoat's map baking.

Cheers,
-ShaneO

ya i still haven't given 3d coat a try yet, i work mostly on environment pieces and not characters so i never really needed a full retopo tool, but if it has better UV'ing than maya i might give it a shot.

by texturing how do you mean your using it, just to view your shaders as you work in PS or your painting textures in 3d coat.


do you see much advantage of 3d coat and Voxel sculpting over zbrush and polygon sculpting, cause right now especially with dynmesh in the new zbrush the main limitation of sculpting in polygons in gone now, and a nice advantage to sculpting in polygons is i can easily decimate and bring it into something like maya or just export straight to xnormal.

though it could be worth getting for UV's if it has really nice UV tools to work with, since it is just one click in VW to move something into 3dcoat and start UV'ing.

What is 3d coat like for UV'ing hard surface objects, or is it more aimed at characters and organic objects.

3DCoat is fantastic for UVing, the best imo. If you have to use Maya, the closest thing is a plugin called CAS. http://www.castorlee.com/maya-tools/auto-uv-mapper   I use 3DCoat's UVs for characters mostly, but I think it would be just as good for hard surface. It has great packing stuff.

3DCoat is also fantastic for Retopology. Also the best imo. The only thing close is Retopogun or Silo is third runner up. 3DCoat would be great for retopo-ing organic ground becasue you can just draw spines on the surface.

Yeah, Zbrush's new Dynamesh is a blast! But trying to retop in Zbrush is an exercise  in frustration. 3DCoat can handle up to 16 mill polys, so you don't have to decimate before bringing it in. You still need to decimate to bring it in to Maya to transfer the details to your retopped mesh though. Gah, so many stinking programs!! I wish they'd all get in bed and make one program to rule them all!!

If you have any more pipeline questions, feel free to ask.

Cheers,
-ShaneO

I agree 110% 3DCoat is the Bomb for UVing..  I'm a lazy modeler, and most times, I will just do my poly model, then either tweak / scale it in BlackSmith3D, nice for making variations on same model, super ez.. then I will do finish sculpting, painting, etc.. in 3DCoat, and when I import to either of these apps the Auto-Uving is the bomb, I will just load into 3DCoat and tell it certain things, like auto-uv, and whether or not to use auto-smoothing, and the limits for corners and stuff, and the texture format and let it fly, then almost all the time, this is all that is needed for per pixel painting etc.. but they do offer a really good retopo tool, and allow you to re-adjust the islands and everything..  Then if you want you can even import it into sculpt room or voxel room for finishing touches.. then when done, give it a poly limit let it save it out, and if you want to lower poly level even more you can use Blacksmith3D's tool for interactive level of detail, and lower the poly numbers with a slider and see the results on the fly.. re-save the model, and either use BS3D or 3DCoat to bake the textures for bump maps etc.. and viola' a model that is almost as good as the super high poly model, or at least close enough for any game I have seen..  Oh forgot about using either Messiah pro v5 or character shop for rigging and auto animation seq's or doing it manually in Messiah or Frag3D using IK Painting etc..

Hope this helps with workflows and where various tools can help speed things along etc..  Also, one other tool I like to use for things like heads etc.. is either sculptris or CB-Model Pro, both are awesome sculpting apps, and both have the right tools for the job, then you can import the head into the model, attach it by welding some verts, then of course use BS3D to lower poly's etc.. see above..  oh did I mention that both CB-Model Pro and Sculptris are free!  I'm beta testing CB-Model Pro, and I love it!

Hope this helps,

Ciao' 4 Now,

StOrM3