Request some advice.

[the_rotton_core]

Hi everyone, I'm after some basic technique and advice for high poly modeling and sculpting.

I started out as nothing more than a simple modder for the elder scrolls games, making armour edits to basicly make my characters look cooler. This aloud me to learn the basics of low poly modeling and texturing, normal maps were just made from textures which were made by chopping together photos.

I'm now advancing my work into the realms of high poly and am after some tips on how to get the effects I want.

For a start I only use free software. As this is a hobbie I can't really invest in expensive programs, also I don't agree with illegal downloading so I steer clear of anything like that.

For low poly modeling I use wings 3d (I can make a low poly anything I want in this baby)

For texturing I use gimp.

For high poly I have recently started using blender's sculpting tools, which are an absolute joy. I can also use blender to bake normal maps and textures to be edited in gimp.

One of my first quries is really about style. Using the sculpting tools It's easy to make something which looks organic.. (here's a shot of something I've been doing just to practice)

http://i136.photobucket.com/albums/q189/arkham666/bioarmourrender.jpg

but what if I wanted to combine organic shapes and solid angualr objects. This may seem very noobish but it's one I'm really stumped on. Anyway any help is welcome.

[ReplicA]

I don't know anything about blender, but normally, if you want organic as well as hard surface stuff going on, you should have multiple objects. SOME people can sculpt in the hard surface details and make them look fantastic, I'm not one of those people. I find it easier, and cleaner to just have seperate meshes for the individual surfaces.

Take your screens for example. They appear to be the start of a torso, with organic, and hard surfaces. I would keep one mesh for the organic torso fleshy bits, and add more meshes for the hard surface stuff. It's easier that way, for me, to keep track of what's going on, to make sure the armor is fitting the torso, not the other way around, I can hide certain objects, to concentrate on others, etc.

But that's just how I do it, someone else will probably have some other methods that might suit you better than my example. Good luck.

[devoid]

So i dont know anything about blender either :) but if its anything like the "pro" sculpting tools there are only two ways I know to get good crisp edges. One is using multiple objects (subtools in zbrush) as ReplicA says. The other is to use alphas. I'm going to assume blender has some sort of alpha capability since it a pretty basic requirement out of a 3d package. You can find a bunch of good tutorials/ vids floating all over the place about using alphas in zbrush and mudbox. These should give you the idea, the actual implementation inside of blender i cant help you with. I'd suggest looking up tutorials on sculpting environmental objects in zbrush since these make heavy use of alphas.
Good luck.

edit -- Oh also forgot, check out if there is a brush/tool with a name like "pinch" or "crease" I've also seen some people make good use of these. Not my preferred method but seen some crazy good stuff using it.

[the_rotton_core]

thanks for the input. The seperate objects thing seems straight forward enough. I'll start scouring the internet for some alphas tutorials. Your help is appreiated.

edt.. yes blender does have a pinch tool but it's not that great for making crisp edges unfortunatly, but it does help to give them definition.