I'm curious about how long it takes an experience modeller to create a character model (and have it animated) for an engine with such high detail as the Unreal 3 Engine. I'm talking about the original multi-million polygon source art model, which is then converted into a low poly model, with a normal map. Just wondering if anyone knows the amount of time required for something like this (if it's possible to even specify..) Many thanks, -Bo

How many polygons are you talking about in these scenes? The humanoid models created for UE3 are upto 8 or so million polygons, as source art.

The time varies of course. Extremely high-poly models aren't as hard as you would think when you factor in applying detail maps. There's also brilliant tools like ZBrush that basically let you "paint" enormous detail onto models via brushsets.



Something like this, for instance, would be surprisingly easy to accomplish if you were experienced with the program.

The actual modeling isn't always the hardest, or longest part. You have to factor in unwrapping and texturing, rendering, animating.. the list can go on and on.

I think you missed the point of my question. I'm asking mostly about creating the model from which you make your normal maps. The original model which is made of a stupidly high amount of polygons, and then simplified to game content size, and the extra information put into a normalmap. However, I've got to phone the company whos engine we're going to license on monday, so I'll just ask them I guess.

Quote:

Original post by Salsa The time varies of course. Extremely high-poly models aren't as hard as you would think when you factor in applying detail maps. There's also brilliant tools like ZBrush that basically let you "paint" enormous detail onto models via brushsets. Something like this, for instance, would be surprisingly easy to accomplish if you were experienced with the program. The actual modeling isn't always the hardest, or longest part. You have to factor in unwrapping and texturing, rendering, animating.. the list can go on and on.

I'd like to apologise, it would seem that I'm just not up to date with this stuff. However, the engine we're licensing seems to recommend Maya/3DMax for the model creation. I tried ZBrush (although I won't actually be working on models for the game) as was thoroughly confused about what any of it really did. Could you give any rough idea at all to an amount of time for a specific model? (Ie, show a model and with how long that took).

I'd be very appreciative of it if it could be done :).

This is not really what you were after, but there are some videos on pixologic.com that show the creation of models in z-brush from start to finish. Pretty cool stuff.

I've only had limited experience creating normal maps from high poly models but it seems that it is not overly difficult. I'm a level designer and content artist so I don't have extensive experience creating human models or lots of characters, although I have created a few in the past as they were required for various projects. For me I would expect a typical human-like model; armored knight, modern combat soldier, clothed assassin, etc. to take a couple of days to create the low poly version and layout the UV's.

Modeling, is the easy part, it's laying out the UV's that take a while. Especially, since I'm extremely anal about making sure that my UV's have absolutely no stretching and maximize texture resolution. This is also assuming that the concept is already created. The high poly model from that point might take one 40 hour week to create and polish up, but I'm sure there are some artists that are much faster. Of course it also depends on the complexity of the character, so in some cases I could actually see several weeks of work for one creature.

I've only had experience creating normal maps in Maya, which doesn't require that the UV's are layed out for the high poly version, which saves quite a bit of time.

I would give a ball park figure of 1-3 weeks to be safe. Longer if you're creating characters for a FPS-type game, less if you're creating characters for a RTS-type game where characters are smaller on screen and require less detail.

I hope this helps.
-Matt

Thanks Matt, that is similar to the kind of figures I was given somewhere else too.

Thanks for that link rollo.. I like ZBrush more and more every time I see it.. however I'm curious how many commercial game engines support the output from ZBrush, unfortunately I'm not allowed to disclose the engines we've been looking at :(, but any indications people can give me would be useful.

You could use zbrush for any engine, not directly ofcourse but what you do in zbrush could be imported into 3dsmax or maya and then converted to a format the engine can read, but what your going to be doing in zbrush for your game is basicly just making a displacement map and applying it to the lowpoly model so zbrush output isnt really all that important.... I may be wrong on certain points ,perhaps somebody more knowledgable can correct my mistakres if I made any. As for engines that directly support zbrush output I have no clue.

You're correct.

It doesn't really matter where you make the hipoly model, it's not going anywhere. You just bake the normalmap from it.

We pretty much all here use ZBrush for our hipoly models at work. Some things are done faster as SubD in a normal 3d app of choice, and some things are done better in ZBrush, doesn't matter.

1-3 weeks for a hipoly character model is right, usually you can do the lowpoly and all maps in those 3 weeks too.