Hi guys,
I’d like to know your experience about which painting method is the best to paint a photorealistic head when sculpting done.
Use only polypainting?
Use texture?
Or possible continue painting in zbrush exist texture?
The ‘best’ is whatever combination of techniques works for you. ZappLink to your painting program. Lots of features in ZBrush to make the unreal. Were you on the TS Forums?
A 4K map has 16 million pixels. With most UV mapping, 25% of that is lost as being outside the UV borders, too. So in practice, such a map has about 12 million useful pixels. Because ZBrush can easily divide a model to ~12-16 million polygons, you’re looking at a 1 to 1 ratio between points and pixels.
This allows polypaint to paint EXACTLY what it’s going to look like. Meanwhile, you have the advantage of being able to paint before UV’s are even assigned to the model. Thanks to the joys of projection, you can even do so before your topology is finalized! And you can paint at the same time you’re sculpting or derive masking from your painting that you can use to drive sculpting of details for ultimate output in a displacement/normal map. Those masks can be used to create all sorts of other maps, too. I believe it was the folks from Sony Santa Monica who were talking about just that at SIGGRAPH. (And my understanding is you’ll be able to view their presentation soon on our website.)
Of course if you want to go ultra high resolution with an 8K map (something that’s almost never used) you can’t hit that high – until you consider HD sculpting which also supports polypaint and allows transfer to texture. So even that hurdle is overcome.
In short, from the people I’ve spoken with – such as this week at SIGGRAPH – the resistance to polypaint usually tends to be due to not realizing the possibilities or simply having an established workflow and not wanting to change. But as people put it to use and take the time to master it, they don’t usually like to go back.
Well I could never do good paint ups with polypaint. My resistance to it comes from it not utilizing layers like mudbox or PS, because layers make it easier for me to paint at least adequate looking pieces. I just find painting easier in mudbox compared to zbrush. However some people can do really amazing things with polypaint.