[Maximus3D]

This is another thing i wanted to see if i could get it working for future and current personal projects, to properly move meshes with preserved UV's all the way and render them smoothly with Maxwell and displacement. And after running a bunch of experimental tests tonight i think i finally got the entire workflow figured out!

I started in Modo and based my tests on a old mesh i had in my archive, some small modifications made it into a ogre like this, nothing exciting so far..


And then i unwrap the UV's for the basemesh of the ogre like this


When that's done i export my ogre head from Modo as obj and import it into Zbrush to do some sculpting on it, this is just a dummy sculpting to get some displacement going on the mesh. This is just above 900,000 polys so it's not alot but that doesn't matter now.


After the sculpting i generate the displacementmap at 4096 pixels resolution in Zbrush and export it as a 16bit tiff image. And i also export my ogre mesh at it lowest subdivision level in Zbrush and import that back into C4D with the help of RipTide.


Last but not least the Maxwell rendering using my 16bit Zbrush displacmentmap on the basemesh exported from Zbrush, works freakin beautifully! me so happy.


Note: Displacement precision is set to 256 in this test, it could be set higher because some details are lost in the rendering now. And the displacement height is set to 12 units which i think looks quite accurate to the height of my sculpts done in Zbrush.

/ Max

[Bubbaloo]

Nice!
It looks like the displacement height might be too much comparing to your zbrush shots.
I'd love to see someone do a proper zbrushed head with realistic texture and rendered with Maxwell. Would be freaking awesome...

[sandykoufax]

Looks good, Max.

May I ask you why are you using Zbrush to sculpt rather than modo.
I've heard that modo has sculpture tool too.
Just due to your preference or skillfulness?
If you use two method altogether, I want to know the merits and demerits of them.
I'd like to learn a sculpting tool.

[Maximus3D]

Bubba: It's possible the displacement height is a tiny bit to high in this test, i'll be taking look at that today to try to match it better. Eventually i should be doing a properly sculpted, textured and rendered head or other model with Zbrush and Maxwell. But i just need these basics sorted out before i move on to that ..and i gotta finish my knife wip.

Koufax: Why Zbrush instead of Modo for sculpting, that's pretty easy to answer as Zbrush is a dedicated sculpting program with much better tools, it can handle millions of polygons without any problems even on such a lowend rig as mine and it's fast and stable. Modo on the other hand is ok to use for lowdensity sculpting and if you need a bit of organic look on a low to mid poly mesh but nothing higher than that. I think it chokes to easily with higher polycounts and it gets sluggish and slow. Even though Zbrush has a strange interface i still consider it the best sculpting program on the market today, it passed by Mudbox when they released Zbrush 3.1 a while back.

Modo sculpting +
- Works fine on low to mid polycount objects
- Integrates well with Modo's paintmodule
- Exports sculpts into normalmaps, displacements, vectordisplacements and bumpmaps.
- Easy to learn

Modo sculpting -
- Slow on highpoly objects
- Tools are a bit odd to work with
- Only works well with a tablet, doesn't play well with mouse.
- Requires a fast computer and graphicscard to be useful
- Not yet fully developed, needs more time to mature (my own opinion)

Zbrush sculpting +
- Can handle millions and even billions of polygons without choking
- It's like sculpting with real clay
- Works great even with a mouse, does not require a tablet to be useful
- Very useful for other stuff than just organic sculpting
- Infinite sculpting possibilities due to it's openness
- And much much more!
- Plays nice even with only 2gb ram.

Zbrush sculpting -
- Interface can be scary, most new users dislike it alot.
- Workflow with external programs is still a bit weird in my opinion.
- Bugs exist, some of which can be annoying at times.
- I'm sure there's more but i can't think of it all now.

If you're gonna learn a sculpting tool i think you should pick either Zbrush or Mudbox as they're dedicated sculpting tools.

/ Max

[sandykoufax]

Thank you very much for detailed answer, Max.
Maybe it'll be better to learn Zbrush or Mudbox.

[Maximus3D]

You're welcome Koufax either of them is better for sculpting, but i'd pick Zbrush if i were you.

Now back to this testing of Zbrush displacements in Maxwell. I resumed work on it today and came across some oddities which could cause problems, see the examples below for more info.

I used my 4096pixels displacementmap and tried to render it with Adaptive activated in my Maxwell material instead of using a fixed value. It renders faster than a fixed value does for some reason, this is not the problem. The problem has to do with Smoothing enabled or disabled in the Maxwell material. When smoothing is off i get some weird artifacts in the surface but i get a bit more details from the displacementmap. However when Smoothing is activated the surface problems are gone, but instead i loose displacementmap detail because of the smoothing. What to do.. :/

Goblin rendered with Adaptive and height set to 8, Smoothing is enabled here.


Same goblin as above, it's rendered with Adaptive on, height set to 8, and Smoothing is disabled. This is not very sexy looking


And btw, Adaptive don't seem to be able to pick up every little detail from my texture. I still loose alot, somehow i thought Adaptive should be able to pickup more detail than the regular value setting does. Maybe i misunderstood that part..

/ Max

[Bubbaloo]

Smoothing on looks great to me.

[Mihai]

Try deleting the level 0 mesh in Zbrush and create your displacement map from level 1 instead. This way smoothing off might work better. Check also with a checkered texture the quality of the UV unwrapping. It may be on some areas there just isn't enough detail in the map, even at 4096. You might want to rework the UV map so the most interesting areas (the face) takes up the most space of your texture.

[Maximus3D]

Thanks Bubba

Mihai: Good suggestions, i'll try that with deleting the lowest subdivision in ZB and your other tips. Now i added a HyperNurbs (meshsmooth) on these meshes and increased the values a bit so the basemesh has more subdivisions than the tests i posted above. And now with Smoothing disabled i think it works a bit better. I'll try creating a better UV for this, it was kinda sloppy and quikly done.

One more render of this with smoothing disabled, new mossy type material and HyperNurbs added to the models.



/ Max

[sandykoufax]

Damm, I'm afraid that this mask appear in my dream.

[Maximus3D]

Hehe i'm sorry it gives you nightmares. I'll give the mesh a big smile when i resume work on this later on, to make it friendlier looking.

/ Max

[Fernando Tella]

Your test are looking great Max!

Lately I'm wondering about changing to Modo but I'm a bit worried about the workflow with Maxwell. Would this work ok jumping straight from Modo to Maxwell? (untill Luxology releases a SDK and a plugin is writen I guess Studio is a must) You know, as I'm doing arch stuff I'm not very prone to switch from one app to another very often.

[Maximus3D]

Thanks Fernando

Switiching to Modo sounds like a good idea, but you have to be sure it will work flawlessly with your other applications first. If it'll work for you depends on what other 3d applications you use, if you're gonna move Modo objects directly to Maxwell Studio or if you're gonna pass them through another host software via a plugin. From what i know so far is that if your Modo meshes are UV mapped then you can easily move them to C4D (via Riptide) and also Maya. I just tested quickly importing this head model into Studio and it works fine!

- Which is your main 3d software now ?
- Are you gonna move Modo meshes directly to Studio ?
- Have you got experience from polymodeling ? and everything related to it

Here's my quick test in Studio when i imported the Modo mesh, looks like it renders nicely there.



/ Max

[Bubbaloo]

I hope this isn't a self portrait!

Have you tested Modo to Max?
That's what I'm looking at.
I really like the look of Modo modelling.

[Fernando Tella]

I would like to move the meshes straight from Modo to Maxwell and forget about max and Autodesk (which is what I'm using now). I guess that what I do in max is called polymodelling, right?

Also I have the feeling that Studio is a bit buggy lately; haven't used it much though.

It's great that in your test, mesh and uv's are imported fine; thanks for trying.