Well im tired of displacement maps becuse they sucks.They dont give the amount of details i get inside mudbox with 5 million polys.I want to export the mesh (5million+) to 3ds max 9 but hum then it crashes (3d studio)

Is there a way to get the amount of detail i get in mudbox ?whats the point sculpting a model at 5 million polys if i cant use them in my render.Can i split the model into pieces or something and then put it together again in Max but with less LOD?

have tried to find some good treeds on this but i cant.Also i get more details with my normalmaps then displacement which i find kinda odd??

well guess i didnt explain it very well?!?

If i have a model that will go over 20 million polys and my computer can only handle 5 million what do i do?

If all you want is displacement maps....take your original low rez mesh and place it in the scene with your high rez (inside of mudbox). Bake a displacement map(s) and then apply them to your mesh as mental ray materials in max. I wouldn’t actually try and export your sculpt back into max....there’s no way it can handle it.

well i dont want displacement maps.It doesnt look like in Mudbox when render in 3ds max!!!!!!! Displacement maps sucks! Its close but not as close i want it

ive seen people with LOTS of details in their renders but please dont expect me to belive its done with displacement maps!

When they made Gears of war characters they didnt use any displacement maps,They imported the highres models into their 3d app in chunks(pieces) what ive read,They didnt use Mudbox,They used Z-brush

So whats the procedure?

They don’t generally use displacements in games.....normal maps (as I’ve come to understand them are much more efficient for game engines). I’m fairly certain that GoW used normal maps (someone correct me if I’m wrong here).

A Cliff’s notes rundown of what they do is as follows:

1. Make a low poly mesh that they drop in Zbrush or Mudbox and sculpt
2. Using these programs they generate a normal map based on the difference between the high and low rez meshes (using simulated light rays)
3. These maps are then applied to low rez meshes for use in the game (around 3-6k triangles per character)

A lot of the cool stuff you see are people being REALLY GOOD with shaders and texture management in addition to using normal maps. I’ve seen a lot of ass normal mapped models (it’s the shaders and textures that really sell the models). But yeah, trust me when I tell you that there’s no way they can drop a 5 million polygon model in a game. I doubt we’ll ever get there processor wise.

Okej thanks!Well i know there is a limit for games depending on what engine they run! However what im talking about has nothing to do with games.

I just said i read an article about Gears of war and yes they use Normalmap to increse detail in the game but what ive read they made the character meny millions of polys so they had to split it into diffrent pieces to handle that amount of polys im not sure but they had a plugin to 3ds max i belive the name of it was poly crounch or something to put the pieces together again

Also as i said before .What do i do if i cant handle more then 5 million polys in Mudbox?And i know i need atleast 18 million polys on that model to get a decent geometry to work with??That has nothing with displacement maps or normalmaps to do.I need that amount of polys to generate a good namalmap for the model im working with

Now my pc slows down to 2-10 fps with 5million polys,doesnt matter if i hide some of the geometry,What to do?

I read the same article that you did about Gears Of War, it’s in the character modeling 2 book by ballistic.

In that article, they moved the raw geometry in chunks to max. The reason they did this instead of generating their normal maps in zbrush is because they needed a bunch of hard surface geometry, not just the stuff they sculpted, to be exported as part of the same normal map (or that’s the impression I got from the article anyways).

You can do something similar using mudbox, just use the selection tools, like face select, select the faces you want to export, then choose File- >export selection. That will let you export the highres geometry into chunks.

The software they used for poly reduction is called poly cruncher, and you can get it here: http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/index.asp

So one thing you may try is exporting several objs, reassemble and reduce its complexity in polycrunch, then exporting that to max.

Yes, displacement maps do suck, but you know what sucks as well? Dealing with 20million face objects in max :) Even if max could handle such large geometry, it would be so painful to do any task to them because of the size of the data. So even though displacement maps can be difficult to use, I’d still recommend giving them a try over just using the full mesh.

- Neil

HI there, according to this tutorials you can pretty easy get the amount of detail you want using displacement maps, there’s just certein procedure to do that. This tutorials cover Mudbox-Maya workflow, but the Maya part is more related to MentalRay then software itself so I think this works the same for MR in 3Dmax.

Links to this tutorials were posted in several CG related sites so you might be already familiar with them, but anyways.., there you go:

http://www.pixelcg.com/tutorials/mudbox1_movie.html

http://www.pixelcg.com/tutorials/mudbox2_movie.html

To answer your question in other way (and thats the hardcore way ;)), if you dont wish to use displacement maps why are you using Mudbox od ZBrush-like software? Simply create your LowPoly model, subdivide it to as many millions of polys as your PC can handle, and use sculpting tools in your original 3D package. I dont know about Max but Maya can use custom brushes for sculpting. But be warned, this way you loose ease of use (Mudbox or ZBrush were born for brush based sculpting), efficiency (mainly in rendering time I guess), response time (forget working in realtime here) and so on… like I said, thats the hardcore way.

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NeonTree

HI there, according to this tutorials you can pretty easy get the amount of detail you want using displacement maps, there’s just certein procedure to do that. This tutorials cover Mudbox-Maya workflow, but the Maya part is more related to MentalRay then software itself so I think this works the same for MR in 3Dmax.

I have a tutorial discussing mudbox to mr for max here:

http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/mudbox_max/mudbox_max.htm

But Mentalray does have a few problems when dealing with certain kinds of displacement maps, such as artifacting (see various threads in this forum for examples of problems in xsi and max).

So I can understand this guy’s desire to just have the mesh itself in max. Unfortunately, max (and all the other major 3d apps that I’m aware of) were just never designed to handle that amount of geometry.

- Neil

Thanks alot Soul..!!!!

There was the plugin i was looking for,Meny Thanks!!!!

Yeah but dont listen to Neil Blevins, he doesnt know anything ;) *joking

Hey Neil.

-Adam Baroody