OK as far as I can see the info is a PowerPoint presentation of a much larger tech presentation as to “Read at Dawns” character development pipeline. By the looks of it was presented at Siggraph and would love to see it.
According to Ready at Dawn their objective is.
No Cheats
The whole rig should morph
Expand on existing systems
Use established techniques to achieve best results
Full body transformation
Face and body should all be part of one rig
Reusable rig
One rig used for multiple scenes and multiple characters.
The result of all that as part of the character development pipeline is this.
If you count the number of characters how many are there? Just One.
The Powerpoint page 36 is interesting but I believe it’s 37 or 38 that shows how the base mesh is remodeled, and not retoped, and uses a color map that shows the difference in the UV mapping as it is stretched to cover the surface area necessary for texturing.
So I’m sorry I still don’t understand why your retoping for the purpose of texturing when you say that the modeling is finished and I’m assuming includes UV mapping and texturing?
If you do not have Hero requirements then there are already off the shelf solutions like Iclone or Daz Studio that does this for you with out the need to do everything from scratch.
Are you doing all of this as a learning process or are you more interested in doing what is necessary to achieve your goals?
my purpose for this is that I have one character right now, but I will be making many more characters off of the same base mesh.
As a result it is both a learning process and goal achievement.
This is the most important to me.
Being able to reuse a rig is what I want since I will be going very indepth on the rig.
Retopo and UV can be done in 2 days at most but since I am going to work on mult char based off the same base mesh in the future this will be a great bonus.
And what exactly is remodeled? To get that type of topology why wouldnt it be retopoed?
Remodel or remodeling is the process by which the base mash is molded to shape and form as you would a slab of clay with out adding or removing surface detail. Zbrush is very good at this job.
Topology is the actual surface detail define by edge loops and such the determines the shape and density of the model. The only practical reason to generate new topology off of the base shape is to decrease the mesh density by using the top tools to rebuild the surface off of the donor mesh to get a much cleaner topology at a lower polycount with out the mess that procedural optimization tends to produce.
A quick example I did of remodeling the trooper model in 3ds Max. Simplified but more or less the required process if you wish to share build assets from on character to another and save a lot of additional work in the process.
Ready At Dawn is an open development company who seems to be more than happy to discus their process as well as their development pipeline rather than hiding behind the NDA mask. They even have a forums section to ask questions and a Tech Talks section.
Off the shelf though there is already software based solutions that have been around for a while that you can make use of as far as the need for parametric digital people goes all which shares the same base but can share common assets of a single framework.
For our needs for our project Daz Studio and Genesis 3 was the perfect fit but still took a few years to figure out how to fit it into our pipeline based on practical needs over usability that involved both code and content needs.
It should be noted that most Indy based companies are willing to share information, as it’s a win win for everyone, so if your interested on how company X does something it only costs you an e-mail to find out.
I am just piggy backing on this discussion as you seem quite knowledgeable. I am looking into making a game in UE4 with little budget and ressources. I have some experience in 3D and was wondering what sort of piepeline you are using since I just got into DAZ3d ?
I am looking basically at using Blender / Daz 3D/ UE4 as a pipeline for character / asset creation essentially. However the further you look into specifics of the pipeline, the more you obviously stumble upon issues. Right know, I can get a Daz 3D Gen 8 character in UE4 with animation / Skinning. However You can see that Dazs corrective morphs do not come accross and so the limits of the weighting show in UE4. Have you had any experience in terms of getting all the detail/subtleties of details of Dazs models into UE?
