maxxxmodelz posted at 4:23PM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236189

This is an impressive package. I love the skull model, and will use that often on it's own I'm sure! Excellent modelling! Can't believe how low the poly count is overall, considering the scale of the scene. Thanks!

Thanks. One interesting tidbit we could potentially discuss here in the forum is in regard to topology. The tree in this scene, for example, was created with the auto-topology tools in 3d-Coat, over a sculpted voxel mesh. This presented some issues later on in the workflow that I should have anticipated. Because the geometry was not created with logical modeling techniques (in order to save time), the unwrapping of the mesh was much less efficient, and far less controlled than I would have liked. The auto-topo feature produced quad topology that, while worked fine to reproduce the sculpt in quads, produced edge loops that weren't logical, and wouldn't allow me to unwrap the object with the island placement of a typical polygonal mesh. This meant that I could not choose which parts of the model were unwrapped to it's own island, and I had very little to no control over the angles of the UV itself. Creating the object this way forced me to unwrap also with the "auto-unwrap" feature, which produced chaotic and random island placement that would have been unusable in an image editing software to paint the textures. Luckily, the painting tools in 3d Coat are extremely powerful, and rival Photoshop. So I was able to paint directly on the model, without worry about the seams on the UV template. However, editing the texture in the future will also need to be done back in 3d Coat. It wouldn't be possible to edit the UV's in something like Photoshop, because of the way the auto-unwrap placed the islands and texture coordinates. Compare the UV templates of the tree to something like the skull or the hill in this set, which I unwrapped with manual, traditional techniques. The skull UV template can be easily edited in any image editor by hand, if need be.

I think this is a great practical example of why topology is so important, and is still very relevant to the creation of a good model, especially for redistribution, or a production pipeline. I think this is why modeling things the traditional way, or doing retopology with a good understanding of edge flow, is still very important in the world of CG.

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