Ormulu Belle Epoque Mirror

[L'Ancien Regime]

The main mesh is in Maya polygons smoothed and I'll be taking parts out for reworking in 3d Coat with the merge tool, reworking them as voxels then retopoing them and bringing them back into Maya to stick onto the main frame.

[L'Ancien Regime]

That was fast...damn fast.

[L'Ancien Regime]

Am I ever glad I bought 3d coat...

[picot]

Fine work! C'est bien parti..

[L'Ancien Regime]

Yay! I finally figured out how to get the Merge tool to work with high rest Voxel image..

[L'Ancien Regime]

Rapid test sketch to see how everything will fit together. 2d paint brush is awesome for this.

And this makes me think that in huge scenes when you need to have a lot of props in your scene, it would be a very effective way to work to have the most distant objects in the scene to be nothing more than quick sketches like this that would give a mere impression without requiring a lot of toilsome detailing....

[Tony Nemo]

Do you mean "quick sketches" used to make planes painted with color, normal map and alphas?

[L'Ancien Regime]

Do you mean "quick sketches" used to make planes painted with color, normal map and alphas?

No, just quick voxel sketches...voxels cry out for a monster computer with massive amounts of RAM and a Soviet Army of CPU cores but if you can get them 3d Coat rules..

[Tony Nemo]

What I was suggesting was to put all that voxel work on a flat surface (since it is always displayed on a flat surface) and use exported displacement and normal maps to achieve a very low poly but gorgeous mirror for use in a scene with many other assets.

[L'Ancien Regime]

What I was suggesting was to put all that voxel work on a flat surface (since it is always displayed on a flat surface) and use exported displacement and normal maps to achieve a very low poly but gorgeous mirror for use in a scene with many other assets.

That's at the end when I'm texturing it. By sketch I mean just roughing things out to see how the proportions will work and how I'll lay out the masses of the object.

[L'Ancien Regime]

The Chimera...I wonder what it would be like to make love to such a creature??? I think I'm falling in love with her..

[michalis]

Well done, though I may not agree with the entire workflow.

I mean, having maya to do all the splines work, why do you need to drop it to voxels and retopo it?

This model is mostly a displacement friendly mesh.

Chimera looks great. BTW not a chimera, a sphinx probably. And you may fall in love with her. Never with a chimera because she-it doesn't have a human face.

[L'Ancien Regime]

The workflow is strange but then I'm not content with any of the workflows I've seen out there and there seems to me to be two contradictory elements to this work pulling it in two directions. The hard edged frame will need to be elaborately textured, and like my fauteuil on the finished works gallery I'd sort of like to have it firmly pinned down in its rectilinear topology so I can place the repetitive geometric patterns carved into in in Photoshop. But contradictory to this there are the organic elements; the scrollwork, the garlands of acanthus leaves and the sphynx. I'm tempted just to go back and forth with them between maya and 3d coat working and reworking them. I'm sort of toying with finishing them in Zbrush if I can't get the detail I want in 3d Coat though for now I'm trying my best to keep this a 3d Coat job. Frankly the Zbrush workflow leaves me a bit cold and I like Voxels a lot. Perhaps I'll have to just bite the bullet and go out and buy 8 more gigs of RAM to double up on it to handle the full load of the work. Note the Sphynx is over 4 million triangles...

If you can suggest various resolutions to this puzzle they'd be welcome. I'll definitely consider them carefully.

[L'Ancien Regime]

See the thing is I utterly despise the retopo in Zbrush while I think the 3d Coat's retopo tools are THE BEST in the business. Unwrella, HeadusUV Layout whatever, they're all junk to me. 3d Coat is it. I actually enjoy laying out UV maps in 3d Coat and that's insane because UV mapping fills me with nausea.

So on one hand I need to be in 3d Coat but on the other hand I'm apprehensive about it's ability to handle a large complex structure like this.

So what I'm doing is basically tippy toeign around a lot of problems hoping that they'll all resolve themselves somehow by the time I'm finished sculpting and ready to lay on textures...textures that must be fairly precise, repetitive and tightly symmetric or regular...

I'm not sure doing that in 3d coat's 3d environment will work..

[digman]

I can give a few suggestions. With the limited about of information in a forum post I might missed the mark but hopefully some will help.

I think you might be merging the low polygon sphinx model with too high of a voxel resolution. Bring in your model only high enough to capture the details you need. The 4 million voxel model I see in your picture for that amount of detail your voxel object could easily be 500,000 voxels.

Build the larger forms at a lower voxel resolution at first. Don't forget the resampling feature, left side toolbar near the bottom. It will resampled down or up your voxel model while trying to keep as much as detail as possible.

Once you are happy with the larger forms increase voxel count for the fine details.

Don't forget the regular surface mode tools. Liveclay tools are still on the raw side at this stage of development but once they are done they will be a great addition.

High voxel resolution is important for extra fine details but not bulk form building.

I have included a picture to show you.

The model is one I got off Blend Swap. It is about 4000 polygons, I would have modeled it a diffeerent way for 3Dcoat as there are a few problems with the model but it shows the point I am trying to make.

The model on the left is 1 million voxel polycount enough to capture the details. The model on the right is resampled down to 500,000 thousand.

Both of these have as much detail as the sphinx model which is at 4 million voxel polycount and it appears you are still on the medium bulk form building

I have lots of voxel resolution left to work on the axtex model for adding form or details...