Week 20 - Sculpting

 

Week 20 - Sculpting (Autodesk Mudbox)

What Have I Learned This Week?

Sculpting is the process of creating additional high poly detail onto the surface of a mesh that would usually be hard to model manually. Examples of sculpting detail can be scratches and wear and tear on models such as weapons, as well as, additional patterns and complicated designs. It can also be used to create greater detail and displacement for environment art and landscapes, for example, hills and mountains or caves. These sculpts are used on High Poly geometry where the complicated detail will be baked onto a normal map to create the immersion of detail on a low poly surface model.
Before I would start sculpting on my final asset, I needed to practise using Autodesk Mudbox to be familiar with how it works and what I can create on it. The first thing to note before sculpting is subdivisions. If a model is low poly with only a few subdivisions the sculpt will not work as sculpting works by manipulating the vertices of a poly mesh causing displacement, lifting or pushing in the geometry. This process is known as remesh where the vertices need to be resampled to be able to mesh into the shape sculpted. You will notice this happening when the mesh begins to look low in resolution. Simple keys to note when sculpting on Mudbox is CTRL, this will cause carving and pushing into the geometry surface, Left Mouse will build and lift the geometry. The strength of the brush can be adjusting by holding M and dragging or adjusting the scroll wheel. Holding Shift will use the smoothing brush, this will smooth out and sculpt surfaces that appear jagged. Holding B will adjust the brush size. If you're struggling to create straight and smooth lines when Steady Stroke can be turned on. This tool allows the user to slowly sculpt into geometry and the sculpt will follow behind the cursor for more precise and straight-line movement. 

I practised on a simple cube mesh to get more adapted to using Mudbox. I made sure to increase the subdivisions before sculpting so that I was less likely to have to remesh later on in the process. I wanted to experiment in both carving and building on geometry. My first attempt was to create a face like surface. When sculpting, symmetry can be applied in all 3 axes to create mirrored detail. I used symmetry here for the face I created on the surface, making sure to use Shift to smooth out the rigid geometry. Here I used a large and stronger brush size and strength, I also wanted to practise patterning. For the patterns, I used a much smaller brush size and experimented with my drawing tablet to see what sort of patterns I could achieve. Here I tested with spirals, bots and curvature patterning, some were created using Steady Stroke so that they did not come out rigid. 



As I sculpted a variety of detail onto this cube mesh, the polycount was inevitably going to be very high even after remeshing. Polycounts like this are not optimal for Games Assets, sculpts like this would be converted into a normal map.


As I had never baked a sculpted source mesh, I took my model into Maya to experiment and see what happens. As it was a simple cube mesh, I used a simple cube mesh as my target for the bake. This mesh would then already be UV unwrapped as nothing has tampered with the model. I assumed any carved sculpts would appear in a normal when the target overlaps in a bake but I did not know what would happen with sculpted geometry. I did not know if the target mesh needed to be modelled out into the resemblance of the sculpted shape or if the bake would still pick it up even if it was overlapping. For my bake, I left the cube completely untouched and instead adjusted the envelop over the sculpted detail. 

As I found from my results, the Bake would pick up both the carved and built up geometry regardless for the Normal Map. This allowed me to get a perfect Normal containing all the details from the sculpt into a simple Low Poly cube mesh. 





This knowledge will be beneficial to me for my final weapon asset as I now don't need to experiment and worry about how I will bake a sculpted geometry. One thing I will need to think about for the final asset is the amount of sculpts I will do in Mudbox. Although my computer is quite powerful, It still has limits to how much it can handle in Maya. I will have to consider the limits to how many polygons my computer will take when sculpting detail as some of the sculpted details can also be created in Quixel as a Paint Mask.



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