I’ve tried many of them, and in my opinion, the best by far is Mainframe North’s “Bool”: Out of the box, Maya doesn’t work that way, but there are a few scripts and plugins out there that can help. The other key to this workflow is being able to work with booleans non-destructively. They’ve been super buggy in Maya and have produced pretty much unusable geo, but trust me, they work now. What?!? I know, booleans, especially Maya booleans, have sucked for a very long time. His Polycount forum name is “ Amsterdam Hilton Hotel”, and while he doesn’t know it, he’s been a total life saver.īen’s post involved working in 3ds Max, but I use Maya, and the technique totally works in Maya too.
Zbrush hard surface full#
I do however, want to give full and proper credit to the author of that original Polycount post. Hopefully then, you won’t have to read those 6 pages over and over again trying to understand what they’re talking about. So, if you’re like me, and you find hard surface modeling “challenging”, I’m going to try to break the technique down for you here. This was exactly the solution I was looking for. The thread is currently 6 pages long, and I gotta admit, I had to read through all 6 pages two or three times before it really started to make sense, but when it did, it was a total “Eureka!” moment. So, I kept scouring the interwebs looking for a better way, until one day I came across this thread on ’s forum: Maybe that’s been the crux of the problem for me all along: The idea that you had to model your game assets twice, from scratch, just didn’t seem right. Unfortunately, hand work like this takes a looooooooooooong time, and as I’ve said before, when working as a lone gun indie game developer, time is by far, your most valuable resource. So what do you do? Typically, you hand retopologize your high poly model using something like Maya’s “Quad Draw” tool. Decimation Master and ZRemesher don’t work at all well on hard surface shapes.
Zbrush hard surface manual#
Most of the time, there is some manual cleanup that you have to do at the end, but it’s pretty amazing how much of the low poly work these automated tools can do for you.įor hard surface assets however, there’s no free lunch.
You just click a few buttons and “Boom” you’ve got a low poly version of your asset for free. Sometimes, these tools do pretty much all the work for you. As an added bonus, ZBrush has some nice built in tools (“Decimation Master” and “ZRemesher”) that can help you derive your low poly model directly from your high poly. Most people I know, typically start by modeling the high poly version.įor organic shapes, ZBrush is typically the weapon of choice for the high poly work. For any asset you want to put in a game, you generally need 2 models: A high poly version, and a low poly version. Well, first lets take a step back and look at modeling game assets in general. What makes hard surface so difficult for me? Well, I think it all stems from my perception that hard surface modeling is needlessly inefficient and time consuming. I still wasn’t really “getting” hard surface. Unfortunately, much of what I read and watched didn’t really help. As you might expect, there’s a lot out there on this subject. I searched for any tips, tricks, and workflow tutorials that might help improve my hard surface skills. I started off trying to tackle this problem the usual way: Google. Unfortunately, the game I’m currently making involves a LOT of hard surface modeling, so I’ve been forced to confront my weakness head on.
For whatever reason, it just never clicked with me. Hard surface modeling has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as a game developer. Diary of an Indie Game Developer: Chapter 7
0 kommentar(er)
