Female Zombie Game Character

[mucsiattila]

Hi! My name is Attila. I want to create a female zombie character for HL2 source. It may has 4000 triangles, becouse there will be a lot of them on screen.

#1 - First I thought to crearte the basic mesh in max with its 4k tris (~2k quad), put it into ZBrush for sculpting a high res version to create maps, than lower subdiv level to basics, and triangulate to finish it.

#2 - Than I asked some people, who suggested me to make a high res character, and with the help of it build an other low res triangulated one, and bake textures, like this one:
http://vimeo.com/5734031

#3 - This looks hard for me, so I was thinking on building a base, detailing in ZB, and lower the res with decimation master plugin.

So wich way is better/best?
Will be max and ZB ok for this work?

please do advice...

thx in advance

Attila

here is the "pre" stage with 3328 triangles

[Krallis]

I personally would go for the


-Make a basemesh.
-Import into ZBrush for detailing.
-Retopologize and castdetails.
-Decimate or bake Normal Maps

Im doing that approach with my fire salamander.

[exigaen]

ok, first thing: reference is king. when you're character modelling, regardless of whether you're doing high poly, low poly, for animation or just a sculpt maquette, reference is king, it's your best friend, its the false idol you bow down and worship. get some!

second, if you intend this to be a game character that will be rigged and animated, her back is far too bent. i figure you're trying to give her a sexy pose / quality, but that needs to be done once she's all rigged up. modelling it like that will only give the riggers and animators headaches, so best practice is model with a slight curve if you model with any curve at all. once again, reference comes in handy here... check out a few different side plane shots of women standing straight, so you can get an idea of average posture and work off that.

3rd: it might actually help to draw out a biped bone female or import a source character rig and model her around that. just use it as a rough guide, so that you get the proportions posture right.

[Raul]

Welll..

the two peeps before me are right. There is a certain order on which you approach this. And yes, you need a lot of reference.

The approach you decide to take on this is entirely up to you. Of course, if you are using a specific software, some techniques are going to work better than others.

Ideally, you want to create a series of base meshes. I like to do this in softimage.

Keep your base meshes all quads. Then go to zbrush. Use the subtool master to bring in all your subtools.

FIND SOME REALLY GOOD REFERENCE! If you lack at drawing, i can already tell you that the details on the sculpt will lack as well. If i were you, i would look for professional concept art and ask permission to model their stuff. Your model will always look as good as your reference. If your reference is crap, your model will look like crap. Even if you are the best modeler in the world.

Next up, is sculpting.

Once you are done sculping, u could use the decimation master to bring in a less heavy mesh into your modeling app.

Build your low poly on top of your decimated mesh. Or create a really really decimated mesh and use that as your low poly and combine it with your base mesh. Just know that if you take this approach, starting out with a box, or a flat face ( for the head ) will not help your case. You really want to partially have everything modeled in your base mesh. I know some people like to start off a box, but to me that seems like it just takes time. You might want to also look into retopoligzing. Again, this step alone is totally up to you since there are many ways to do it.

Once you get your low poly done. Unwrap it, and make a quick cast to see if your models topology hold the normal. Ifthey dont you migth need to do some tweaking. Just do a quick uv, nothing fancy. Automatic uvs should be fine at this point.

Before you begin texturing, i would take the finalized low poly into the half life 2 model viewer. And assign the textures. Check your textures in real time to see how the specular and normal are affecting your model.

And thats pretty much it....