Brush Issues?

[DemureAura]

I'm sure this has a simple solution that I am just not seeing, but for the life of me I cannot figure it out.  
The attached image demonstrates what most of the brushes actually do, and I'm not entirely certain why.  

[Christoph_Schaedl]

you have to subdivide the sphere... shortcut shift+d

[DemureAura]

I thank you for the assistance, and not pointing out my complete idiocy for not recalling something so basic.  

[RobinBall6995]

If you toggle wireframe on, or flat shading, you can see the density of the geometry more easily. Useful to see if you'll have enough or need to subdivide again.

[DemureAura]

Really did not know that either, so thank you! 😄

This may be the wrong place to ask this, and it may go unanswered... but I'll throw it out there anyway.  --  Is it possible to import a 3D scuplt from Mudbox into Unity to use as an object (terrain, character, item, etc..)?  I have seen some rather conflicting answers.  

[RobinBall6995]

You could do. Mudbox exports obj and fbx files and Unity will import those (fbx at least, not sure but probably obj too). But you might find that the mudbox models are too high res to import directly.

And for something like a character you'll need to rig it and skin it and animate it too. So you'll need a 3D app like max or maya to do that bit. Normally in that case you'd use a low res model and bake a normal map from the high res sculpt you make in Mudbox.

There's quite a lot to it. I suggest looking up some tutorials.

[DemureAura]

So the line of progression would be Mudbox --> Maya (or Max, etc..) --> Unity, depending on the object?  I highly doubt there would be a tutorial demonstrating that process, huh?  😛  I suppose figuring out each step in turn would be the best course of action; just have to figure out where to start.  

Digital Modeling by William Vaughan, any good recommendations?  It has a small chapter on sculpting, as well.  

[RobinBall6995]

There's a few different approaches.

One is to start with the base mesh basically done and ready to export to the game engine already with UVs and skinned, then take that into the sculpting program and add details, bake the normal map and apply that to the original model. That's useful if you already know what the end result will be. Also useful in that the high res model will have Uvs so texture painting is straight forward.

Another is to not worry about the base mesh too much, sculpt what you need then re-topologize the end result using any of a number of tools in any package you like (max, maya, topogun etc), then UV and skin that new model and bake the normal map between that and the sculpt. The downside of this is that the high res model won't have UVs. You can work around that by using PTEX.

A variation of that is to use some of the dynamic geometry options in a tool like Zbrush to start with a sphere or any shape and remesh it as you sculpt. Mudbox can sort of do this too, but it's less fully featured. Mesh extract in Zbrush is very useful for generating new meshes from selections. There's loads of speed sculpt videos on youtube of this. It offers great flexibility and freedom for working if you don't know where you're going to go from the start. Great for concepting.

Or a mixture of approaches, depending on the best option for the part of the model. Hard surface stuff might be better modelled in Maya or Max first, the organic stuff might be best sculpted first.

You only need a low res model with UVs and skinned to export to the game engine and a high res sculpt to extract the normal map from. How you go about that is really up to you.

There's loads of tutorials on this sort of process out there if you search. The exact approach depends on what sort of asset you want to make.

Check www.polycount.com for some links. Or if you don't mind paying, check eat3d.com for some great tutorials. Or just browse youtube.

[DemureAura]

I appreciate the time you've taken to explain this.  It's quite clear that I have some studying to do here.
Thank you, very much! 🙂

[RobinBall6995]

No problem. 🙂 It's quite a big topic.