But before everyone jumps in about clean topology lets remember that if you're baking a normal map and it's hard surface that you probably shouldn't care anymore as long as it looks good.

Modo seems to be the furthest ahead in achieving this. In fact the statues were even posed after using decimation master and then finalized after that.Īs everything moves towards realtime booleans though I think that will be come the preferred method for hard surface modeling. (Scroll down and find the videos by epic games.)Ī lot of the hard surface stuff for the infiltrator demo was done inside of zbrush with retopo in max + alphas for detailing. You can see some of their workflow outlined here.

for most cases you're much better off sculpting some generic damage and saving it as generic normal map overlays-that way you can handle damage in photoshop quickly and skip exporting your model to zbrush, sculpting things, decimating the mesh, and finally loading it back into a program for baking.Įpic games uses zbrush for a lot of hard surface things. Imo with hard surface, zbrush should be reserved for final detail passes, if absolutely necessary at all.

this is sort of comparable to making a model house out of blocks vs out of clay with blocks you can just move stuff around and it'll look right, whereas with clay you can do the same, but it requires a lot more work to make it look like it was made that way to begin with. Using zbrush is a complete pain in a production environment where you will be told to make major design changes to the high poly while you're making it or even later in development (if your dumb art director wants to waste time just to look important to execs). to be honest, with hard surface modeling the hardest part is laying out all the shapes, so once that's done all you need to do is separate out the parts and start adding loops. in a production environment you're gonna start with making a greybox blockout, which is a blockout that has all the main shapes and major details made already. Personally I prefer a mix, start in ZB and put some basic forms down with cuts/grooves where you want them, then retopo in something like Maya or Max and add loops for clean edges, etc.

Hard surface modeling zbrush