Low- & High-poly modeling?

[Talon]

I'm not sure what the issues are with UVing? It won't make a blind bit of difference whether you do it first or last. It's not as if you're UVing the high poly mesh or that the high poly mesh is going to affect your low's UV in any way.

With characters, a mid-poly model first is probably best, but I think this topic was more specific to hard-surface stuff.

I wouldn't rely on crazybump for character clothing, either (or, really, for anything other than really noisy photo-based stuff or small details) :S

[thanoz]

I haven't used Crazybump - people just seem to rave about it. I use the Nvidia plug-in and it can get some really fantastic leather and cloth effects very easily with no noise if the settings are put in correctly. I would never use Zbrush or Mudbox to generate repeating textures with fine detail. If I need one stitch to show up at exactly 3 pixels wide by 8 pixels long, there's no point in sculpting that detail even with a stencil - it'll just lose detail on the sculpt, then be slightly blurred in the normal map at the same size.

A mid poly model first wouldn't be a bad thing and is probably closer to what I'd suggest, but it might be a difficult concept to explain to a beginner - going for just enough geometry to give the high rez a nice flow for sculpting, then lowering it later until it's all silhouette and deformation.

A lot of people I've known got into the habit of going straight to the high rez model and saving UV mapping till the last second - and often becoming too frustrated with the process because of it and just not doing the UV's. We've all seen portfolios full of simple heads with heavy Zbrush sculpts and bodies with no textures and no UV mapping.

I hadn't thought of this poster's question as a hard surface issue though, if that's the case then I can't see a really important benefit of sticking to a direction one way or the other :P

[Talon]

Ah right, for fine detail then yeah. I read that as entire pieces of clothing, folds/wrinkles, et al.

[Jonathan]

I'm sorry, but the vast majority of professionals would disagree with doing low-poly first.

Kevin Lanning, Ian Joyner, Kolby Jukes, and a host of other professional modelers do the high-poly first for a reason.

If you're doing the low-poly first, you're being confined by the silhouette of the low-poly, which is something you don't want. Also, UVs are a non-issues, as you don't even mess with the UVs of the high-poly if (unless you want to do some quick work for possible seams issues, but this isn't the usual thing that happens).

For another example, go read the weapons modeler from Red Storm interview, he does high-poly weapons even if he isn't going to bake the normals!

By "low poly," I'm assuming we mean game-res meshes, which usually have a lot of tris in them. Sure, a subdivided tri will turn into a quad, but if you've spent time sculpting, you know how some topological arrangements can cause annoying pinches in the high res mesh, and no matter how much you smooth or relax the high-res, you'll constantly have a bunched up area.

The best thing to do is for a character, do a quad-model (as much as possible), and then do the sculpting, and then do the low-poly.

[[hP]]

This is a very informative thread.

Honestly, I always thought that most if not all the professionals did theyr High Poly first.

Nevertheless, I recomend reading this for a better in depth reading about the topic.
Normal Mapping Tutorial: Part II - page 2: Tips for Creating Models

[Gen-an]

100% agree with Jonathan here, nice post.

[Flinet]

The more I read the thread and think deeper on the topic, the more it clears up for me. Thanks guys!
It seems to be more logical to model the highpoly first. You never know if there would come up an detail or something while modeling, that could be a problem if making the low-poly first. I'm thinking hard surfaces now. But I'm glad you took the organic modeling up!

I'm still alittle confused about how to model the lowpoly version after making the highpoly. But Hp's link seem to be good! Thanks for that

When I get more into the project I post about it if there would be any problem

[Ghostscape]

Doing hard-surface modeling, I prefer to build the high-poly first. It's much easier to change up parts on a high poly than it is on a low poly, because with the low poly as you scale a cylinder or adjust the curvature of a car hood, etc, you want to change the number of sides of the cylinder or the amount of edges defining the curves to be efficient in the low poly, which either means scrapping a lot of work or being lazy and not changing it up, which leads to inefficient or worse-looking models.

Once you build a high poly model making a low poly around it is dirt simple, mostly brainless work, as it removes the need to guess how many edges you'll need to optimally pull off a shape.

[Flinet]

Yeah that's what I thought

But if I now have A highpoly model and want to make it lowpoly, is it best to start over and model it from scratch or just modify/reduce the highpoly version? Deleting edges and so on? The main thought is for me I think that if I have beveled/chamfer an edge, like this pic:
http://www.zmodeler2.com/shared/imag..._example01.gif

If we say that the highpoly object looks like the middle one on the picture, then what's the best way to make it lowpoly? Because if i just delete some of the edges it wouldn't get the same result as the left pic... I know I could go with the right picture option, but my question is how to get it as the left picture.

Maybe it's a bad example but don't know really how to put it

[Talon]

Usually I'll duplicate then physically subdivide the high poly mesh using an approximation of SDS smoothing. Then turn subpatching off, so that I now have a polygonal version of an SDS model that's more accurate than the SDS cage I had (the SDS cages can be a bit of a mess depending on the model).

After that, it's really mostly a case of removing loops until I have a shape that's low poly enough.

So in your example pic, I'd remove all of the edges inside the bevel, leaving only the outside loops (or if it was a really prominent and large edge, maybe leave the centre one, too).