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Octopus WIP


Deadman21
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Took the opportunity to try out a good work flow with volumetric Sculpting. I retopoed the exported volumetric sculpt. Baked the displacement. Then worked on the textures.

Rendered in Carrara 6.2 with displacement.

Wow! Absolutely cool! I am also interested how complex was retopo process.

I think you have used "Slice" many times and subdivision.

Have you painted it in 3DC?

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Really incredible, it is worth to be placed in 3DC's common gallery.

Can you render it in bigger size?

Really when I (or someone) sees this image the first question is how is it possible to retopo so complex shape?

I am glad to see number 14940 at the middle image :) At least it was done in 3DC :) Without slice it is really impossible to do that work.

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Wow Thanks for the kind words.

I started this to see if I could get my volumetric sculpt out of 3d-coat in a low poly form with all the textures and displacement. It was a process of trial and error unfortunately. During the process I have learned alot and there are areas that need work in the program to make it easier.

Here are the steps I took to get to the final image rendered in Carrara Pro 6.2

1. After sculpting the octopus I used the to polygons button to get a high polygon model to retopo. The biggest hurdle here was that the exported mesh was 2 million polygons and was triangles which produced a very rough blocky model.

2. first I did some small tests to see if I could get good displacement baking when I merged the mesh using the merge into scene button. It worked well but again the displacement map and normal map was blocky due to the fact that the original mesh was triangulated and unsmoothed. I think if the mesh had not been triangulated it would have been much smoother.

3 Since the displacements and normals were rough I knew the only way to make this work was to manually smooth the model. So I had to slowly rework the 2million poly model to smooth it out some.

4 Then I commenced to retopo the whole model. Andrew was right in that to retopo the tentacles I used the slice method, creating many slices and subdividing as needed because I knew to get good displacment they would have to be fairly dense. I knew I needed to keep my model as low poly as I could because Carrara chokes on to many polygons.

To retopo the whole model took less time than you might think mainly do to the amazing slice tool.(thanks Andrew)

5 After it was retopoed I created the UVs. Then merge into scene. That worked very well. It took some trial and error to get decent UVs but eventually I got it. There are some problems with the UVs and I could proble do it again to get better results but oh well. On thing of note is that I tried one time to export out the retopoed model then use the baking tool to referance the high poly mesh but That method always resulted in a out of memory error so I just used the merge into scene method.

6 After that It was standard operating procedures. I exported the mesh and re-imported it then imported the displacement map that 3d-coat made (had to experiment a bit on the displacement levels). Then I stated texturing and eventually exported the low poly mesh for use and render in Carrara. Low poly mesh was around 16,000 polys.

In the end the biggest problem I see right now is that the mesh that is created from the volumetric sculpt is triangulated and unsmoothed which added an extra time consuming step to the retopo process. i would like to see a way to untriangulate the mesh when it is turned into polys and possibly smooth it in some way. Otherwise there will allways be some cleanup to the model.

Here is some more pics and a high res of the final image rendered in carrara.

post-488-1223647342_thumb.jpg

post-488-1223647355_thumb.jpg

post-488-1223647365_thumb.jpg

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Big thanks for sharing images and workflow.

I will make important improvement soon - you will not need to merge reference mesh into scene from VS. You will work in retopo directly over VS object. It will give much faster work and much smoother baking result.

That would rock and would solve they problem in the most elegant way. You rock :)

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I will make important improvement soon - you will not need to merge reference mesh into scene from VS. You will work in retopo directly over VS object. It will give much faster work and much smoother baking result.

That would be awesome and the simplier way to do it.

Thank you Andrew for this, and a Big thanks to Deadman for your experimentation, that's really cool and your octopus rock.

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Great octopus, I am envious of your skill! B)

I will make important improvement soon - you will not need to merge reference mesh into scene from VS. You will work in retopo directly over VS object. It will give much faster work and much smoother baking result.

Wow, that'll be great - really looking forward to this!

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Very impressive! May I ask how long the render with SSS took in Carrara? Only reason is that I did a turntable render that used SSS in Modo and my (decent) computer took forever to render it!

It took about 30 minutes to render which wasn't to bad considering its having to do displacement as well. What took so lone was setting it up to get the best SSS Carrara could give me. There is a lot of things I wish Carrara had in the SSS shader like dedicated back scattering. Im still scratching at it and ill probably try to make it look a little more like its under water.

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I'm a user of Carrara since metacreations days, but you're right SSS it's not easy to set. With modo you can reach a better result in 1/2 minutes (on my system)... BTW the result is good!

-TOXE

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  • 1 month later...
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Is it possible to send me Octopus volumetric model (support@3d-coat.com)? It could be so good to explain usefulness of 3DC's approach to retopology on this example on my presentation in Moscow.

Thank you!

No I don't mind at all :) The problem is that the octopus was retopoed prior to 3d-coat being able to retopo on the volumetric mesh, so the file I used to retopo is 318 MB due to the high poly model. The actual volumetric octopus is only 12 MB. Which one would you like?

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