How were displacements created before retop ?

[Anonymous]

How did people render displacement maps before re-topology. If the base mesh for displacements have to be clean and identical, then how was it done before, what was the workflow ? I may make it sound as though it was some complicated procedure in the past which I know it wasn't but hopefully someone will answer that will explain that missing piece that I and maybe others to know.

[A.Baroody]

retopo tools like cyslice have been around for a while. Characters were also nurbs patches for some time before subdiv took over.

People have been snapping nurbs to poly reference models for a long time. Retopo has always kind of been a workflow, It was just more nurbs patch/curve oriented, meaning you would build your patches of nurbs surfaces by snapping curves to poly refernce models.

For example, Draco from Dragon Heart was scanned in multiple pieces and retopo'd into nurbs.

Now, we're just spoiled 🙂 Subdivs changed everything, although nurbs have their place in the world.

Many of the subdiv rules in terms of edge flow, applied to nurbs patch characters. In fact thats where those rules came from, although they've been updated for subdiv's unique advantages. For nurbs, you needed isoparms to flow in the right direction in the right places just like you now have to with subdivs. It was just much harder with nurbs. Certainly not as easy as welding, cutting and slicing polys at will.

Mudbox, Zbrush.. Topogun... They've changed the game completely, but everything is build upon the things that came before.

[Christoph_Schaedl]

modling by hand without sculpting and the dispmaps hand painted...
like martin krol here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzWAYZ-VOU8

super fine disp details are mostly hand painted even today...

[Anonymous]

I knew you could paint with displacements, but I will watch the video oglu.

People have been snapping nurbs to poly reference models for a long time. Retopo has always kind of been a workflow, It was just more nurbs patch/curve oriented, meaning you would build your patches of nurbs surfaces by snapping curves to poly refernce models.

For example, Draco from Dragon Heart was scanned in multiple pieces and retopo’d into nurbs.

Now, we’re just spoiled 🙂 Subdivs changed everything, although nurbs have their place in the world.

This is the answer I was looking for 🙂 Topology programs made the task more quicker, I wouldn't say easier cause as I know first hand your topology can easily become a giant mess.

Snapping nurbs to polygons is quite a tedious task, before you can even lay down your texturing work, arrgh subdees made things somewhat better, we can thank pixar for that !

[A.Baroody]

We can thank Pixar for a lot of things 😉

When the big subdiv workflow took over, programs like Nendo, Mirai (and its predecessor which i'm forgetting right now) really pushed the subdiv workflow harder than most. The major programs at the time, kind of hacked in a form of subdiv into their poly workflow, where as Mirai was based around it completely. Much of what you see in poly modelling today, came out of Mirai.

The history of this stuff is all very interesting. I hope one day soon, someone does a serious comprehensive documentary on it. I remember seeing something years ago where Ed Catmull and others were talking about the research. They even had the world famous Utah teapot, and some of the earliest 3d animation software ever created.

Anyways, yeah we all owe Ed Catmull, Jim Blinn, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, Oben Ostbey, and many others like John Knoll, Thomas Knoll etc a lot of for all of their hard work.

... and of course the MudBox team as well 😉

[Anonymous]

I remember Mirai, I'm not new to things :). It was pretty robust in terms of Subdee modeling but I never used it just going by testimonials I read.

[Anonymous]

Im probably one of a few if not the only one, with this workflow. my faces are mostly built with nurbs in max. which gives me a triangulated mesh but it looks good. if I want it to have more of a standard edge flow. I make a patch version of the head. that I turn to poly which gives me the edge flow

it should be pointed out that nurbs and patches are not the same thing in every program, certainly not in max. the both use shapes to make a surface but nurbs doesnt give you a squared mesh. it will always have a triangle thru it in 3d max. if not all triangles, patches give you a squared mesh unless you explicitly make a triangle.

patches have always been a faster way to do retopology than poly by poly