Highpoly workflow in Maya?

[Husch]

I am a Max user, but only by accident (was the first 3D App I learned), for my next project I will use Maya 5 for a short animated movie. Now I ask myself what is the best and efficient way to work with highpoly in Maya?
In Max I build a "lowpoly" (between 15 to 20 thousand quad polys) model with close edgeloops and smoothing groups (soft and hard edges in Maya) to define the structure of the highpoly model. Then I did the UV mapping, rig the "lowpoly model" and put an meshsmooth, with two iterations, on the top of the stack to let the renderer create an highpoly model during rendering.

http://www.huschang.de/pimp/hp_workflow_01.gif

So i had a good performance in the editor during animating my character and still have relative short render times.

Can I work the same way in Maya or do I have to change the workflow to make full use of Maya capabilities?

Should I use "Smooth", "Smooth Proxyy" or "Subdiv Surfaces"?
My favorite so far would be "Smooth Proxy" with keep hard edges. But what are the best settings? is it better to smooth the UVs too?
Beside using different layers with Smooth Proxy in Maya, is there a way to work with the lowpoly version of a character, especially during animation, and let Maya Software or Mental Ray Renderer take care of the highpoly version during rendering?

[Daz]

You can work in a very similiar way in Maya.

Wether or not you need to use true hierarchical subdivision surfaces or just smoothed polygons, is really up to you and the needs of the project. For instance If part of the animation is an extreme close up of an eye, you might need to think about true SubD's. Personally I find that for most things, polysmooth as opposed to true SubD's is enough to avoid seeing any edge faceting associated with traditional polygonal geometry.

There is no difference between using smooth and smooth proxy. Smooth proxy simply sets stuff up as layers automaticaly for you. It's still of course the excact same smooth algorithm.

Heres the workflow we have going for cinematics at work, and it works very nicely:

1) Build 20k edgeloop model with a view to smoothing. Whatever means you use to visualize the end smoothed result is entirely up to you, just make sure it's 'undoable'! Some people simply periodically smooth and undo, some use smooth proxy, theres a great script I posted an another thread on this page called 'smooth proxy side by side'. Some people use CPS which is another freebie toolset geared towared smoothing.

2) Rig ( unsmoothed ) model.

3) Animate it.

4) Apply smooth node to geometry before rendering. Our set up is made only a tiny bit more complex than that by the use of referencing.

The best settings should generally be:
exponential
subdiv levels : 1 or 2
continuity: 1
Smooth UV's on
keep geo borders off
keep select borders off
keep hard edges OFF ( try it and you will see why )
keep tesselation off
keep map borders none.

hope this helps.

[Husch]

Thank you Daz, I will follow your advice. By the way, I really love your models and I can only hope to reach this level of professional work sometime.

[Scott Ruggels]

Daz, What's the advice on texturemapping High Poly Geometry?

Scott

[Daz]

watch this space. Im writing a tut as we speak for how I built Moff Tarkin.

[Daz]

oh and thanks Husch! Its easy, just dont have a life ;-p

[Jeff Parrott]

Great, looking forward to the tutorial.