Thoughts on workflow 9-9-08
So I've been teaching myself Zbrush the past few weeks.... its been going ok and I've done some tests with it and Cinema 4d....here's some of my observations...
Zbrush is really good at sculpting fine detail and creating organic forms that would be impossible to replicate in a non 3d sculpting app... Zbrush and Mudbox are the only two I know of...
On the other hand to create the fine detail the Zbrush object get really high poly like 3 million polys+
Its not practical for me to use such a high poly model inside Cinema 4d for animation....
I really love painting my models in Bodypaint... Bodypaint DIES when trying to work with these mega million Zbrush models even on my mega machine...
Zbrush can be used to output a low poly model and a displacement map so that all the fine detail from the millionpoly model can be added at render time... So far I haven't gotten this to work correctly.... BUT even if it did work I would have to paint on the displaced model which can be done with Bodypaints Raybrush mode... but with such a fine SPD map the process lags...
To do facial animation you either need to use bones or morphs or a combination of both.... To create morphs you need to push around a models points... again... with millions of polys/points this is almost impossible.... So you saw lets use the low poly model from Zbrush to do it... that would work as long as the displacement map only contains fine detail... if there's any larger displacement your going to have no way to preview what the morph it doing other than rendering a frame every time you can to see it.... If read about some plugins that show displacement in the Cinema 4d viewport but again...I need to go for speed and stability....
It seems the popular way to do facial morphs in Cinema 4d is to manipulate the points of your model while it is inside a hypernurbs object so that you can work with a low poly geometry and see the higher res results in the viewport in realtime...
So at this point it seems the best way for me to integrate Zbrush into my workflow is to....
Sculpt non-animated organic content to be integrated into C4d scenes...
Sculpt high poly non-animated organic content for use in Close-up/Extreme close-up shots in Cinema 4d scenes...
Add fine detail to low poly characters with SPD via displacement maps...
There are A LOT of kinks in geting Zbrush--->Cinema 4d and back when using low poly models and DP maps for char animation....
Sub-polygon displacement is the key though.... I need to utilize it to the MAX.... It relies heavily on the CPU and available RAM... So my plan is to use as low poly models as possible to capture the form I'm going for with speedy animation and push SPD as far as it can go with my available memory (8gb) .....
back to the computers....Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.