3D Character Pipline

Here is a Construction shot along with the Arzoor Zbrush model and a Beauty shot, just to show the technical part of our character art pipeline.

click to see a it in 3 different angles.

This construction shot is an screen shot from max viewport. We use ShaderFx for testing normal maps inside Max during development of the character and before importing it to the engine. this is a shader I have made that supports 4 realtime lights and an overall ambient light. maps to use with this shader are : Normal,Diffuse,Specular and alpha.

Almost every character in the game take the same path to come alive (aside from animation though), let me explain it. the model will be first modeled in Zbrush, then it will be retopologized inside Zbrush for making the low poly mesh from the original sculpt. then every parts of the low res mesh will be taken to 3ds Max for Unwrapping and normal baking. right now we bake our normals inside max. In 3ds Max environment we have the ability to easily adjust the cage mesh for an accurate normal map generation and easy bug fixes. But the problem arises when your high resolution Zbrush mesh goes really HIGH!! at this moment we usually brake the high res mesh according to low res unwrapped chunks. But almost recently 3mm has proposed to use xnormal for baking the normal maps as it is an stand alone software just for normal baking purposes (and of course some other great tasks). but using it require to solve some other problems (like making additional cage). 3mm volunteered for taking this tedious path for our next boss character, so i hope this new pipeline will work for us