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KoreaIt’s the Polygon Economy, Stupid.
By Ryan Kingslien in sculpting | 13 comments
The biggest issue we face as a digital artist isn’t, as is often thought, topology. Instead, it is polygon count. Why do I say that?
Well, let’s imagine a world where there are no polygons. It’s easy if you try. No nurbs below us. Above us only sky. Imagine all the artists simply creating for today. Imagine there’s no topology. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to divide or subdivide for. Imagine all you had to do was be the dreamer, would you really care about how a bunch of lines are spread over the surface of your model? (Thanks for the poetry John!)
To look at it another way, do we really care where the 1’s and 0’s of this internet browser store the text information we read or whether the images we look at on the web are gif’s or jpeg’s or png’s?
We would likely only care about those details if it meant that a web page took longer to view or looked less appealing.
Its the same for topology. Topology is like an image format. If you sculpt a head out of a sphere and you don’t care about the topology then its alot like working in a .PSD file format. The file size is big but it does the trick. However, when we start to share our sculpt we may need to cut down on the file size. Either because the animation program requires it or our sculpting program requires it.
To cut down on the file size we use Topology tools to put more geometry in some places and less geometry in other places. In other words, we optimize the file.
I like to think of this as the Polygon Economy where we are often trading tight topology control for independence and fast, on the fly, creative thinking.
The tools that help us navigate in the Polygon Economy are below:
- The Pinch Brush, which helps us get nice clean edges.
- ZSphere’s Topology
- ZSphere’s Projection
- SubTool’s Project All button
- ZProject Brush
Happy ZBrushing!
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Fausto | Apr 14, 2008 | Reply
Awesome tutorial Ryan…Its extremely useful. I love the techniques and the problem solving you go over. This tutorial is definitely priceless!!!
slashpot | Apr 14, 2008 | Reply
Extremely good as usual Ryan, thanks.
Giving your age away a bit though!
Anonymous | Apr 14, 2008 | Reply
this is a great tutorial, where can we obtain the scanned data anatomy model? I’ve not seen it on the FOT website.
Polygon Pimp | Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
I would love someday if we could get rid of polygons! We need a sculpting program that we can add and sculpt like clay. Like some intense voxel program then maybe after words it can be converted into a zillion polygons for other things.
Santis | Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
Great, I love these kind of posts
Ryan Kingslien | Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
Fausto - I believe you are referring to the Gnomonology tutorial. I’m glad you liked it!
Slashpot - We can’t stay young forever!
Anonymous - AT this time FOT is not making a digital version available.
Polygon Pimp - Ahmen!
Santis - Thanks!
ipi | Apr 16, 2008 | Reply
I’ve been worries about those kind of thing for a lot of time. Having fun, not worried about those f%?$*$ polygon starting a piece on the fly and at the end having a model with good topology. Silo topology tool and the z brush one are the best…but far from what i hope. You feel like doing the job 2 time…and i’m lazy..
on a positive side thing a getting funnier every day…
sculpt, paint, create is great!!!
ipi | Apr 16, 2008 | Reply
oops…
my thought about polygon and good topology is because i want my model at the end to be animated..
so to resume…
you sculpt a character in ONE block(like a bronze)
then you want it to move. Have leg and arm moving away freely. Godd topology is essential there. You cannot use this piece like that. You need to redo the topology and have proper leg and arm polygon distribution.
SO…..
what is the best way to deal with topology with animation as a result?
jayson | Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
i agree to that! especially when it comes to game characters. polygon count limits the intensive detail (or more like speed is limited by poly count). well, we can’t help but learn to create good topolgy, this way we can speed things up. damn poly count!
jayson | Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
p.s.
more like damn my GPU, and my wallet for not being able to afford a faster GPU.
ipi | Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
the question become to be clear..
what the best ratio between ?:
1-scultping freely like in real
2-having good topo for deformation
3-not feeeling like doing the job two time…(sculpt then retology)
i’m obsessed with that for long
being able to model in a non-linear way..i mean that you can start with details on a particular place of the mesh,change general shape,fast retopo for early-rig but take keep the mesh details REALLY good, adding details again on the new mesh and again tuning the topolgy etc…
seem like a pretty fun workflow for me
tell me about you’re though!!
very stimulating place!
ipi | Apr 18, 2008 | Reply
sorry i was a bit off topic but..about the polycount…
you know i model with animation in head…
so if the mesh can’t give realtime feed-back in maya at low-res it’s not cool for me
..need a decent preview(beauty/performance)
i know you can break thing up(no deformation) for better performance but is long to do and very dull
topology again
so the mesh you’ve retepologized on the zproject video will crash my cpu before you can see a decent face(polydistribution on the head is not enough to show details)
no decent preview..
except if there edgeloop to optimize thing..
zsphere..long and technical…zproject fast and fun but how close the target mesh will match a “standard edge loop base” source mesh
seem a lot of trial error to have it right…
it’s possible to see the wireframe of the mesh in the zprojectvideo…
a bit long again…
sorry
3d is funnier and less technical everyday,
but their a long long road ahead..go go!
Disco Stu | Apr 22, 2008 | Reply
hey ryan first off all great job with your blog been viewing all along and some things really helped! the reason im commenting is just to give u an idea for zbc. there should be avatars for members!!!! also it would be great to have a little award system like viewers coice and so and so. i know this is all stolen from cgtalk or others but it would be really great i know i could also be a member on other pages like others but zbc is jus my number one and only. i dont know if all this is possible just a wish.