Poly Modeling vs Sculpting - Which is Better?

hey guys anymore confront flip moments here in this video we're going to talk about differences between traditional poly modeling and sculpting we had a lot of questions about this we figured we would give this a proper spin before that makes sure to subscribe and hit the little notification bell to get up to date every single time we get make any video so one of these isn't better than the other that's you know that's the first thing we just want to be clear on they have different use cases and they're good you know they're separate things each there's not like sculpting isn't superior for making cars and like poly modeling isn't necessarily superior for making characters it's all about finding the right tool for the job so the mean difference between poly modeling and sculpting where you do poly modeling in something like blender or maya max and you do sculpting something like ZBrush where the main difference is that when you were sculpting you're separating out the design phase and the topology phase so first you're making sure that your design is fine you make sure the shapes are all the exact way they should be and then you go in and refine it that you refine the topology later on and then you make sure the poly is in the exact same spot well poly modeling you're doing that at the same time so then you're blocking in the face and you'll be blocking all the main loops at the same time as you block in the design this is awesome for certain things like if you're doing a car model for instance and you have tight blueprints it's a really good idea to like poly model it up you can block it in with polygons and from there you can really refine the shape if you're doing anything from references it's a good idea particularly doing props I would never sculpt a prop I will poorly model up the problem yeah like if you're doing a chair or anything for archivist tables I know a umbrella for example you know all these objects poly modeling is the way to go there because this means that now you get to apology at the same time and these objects aren't that complicated to do and particularly if there are many different pieces in it as well like an umbrella like you know you have like 20 different small pieces and it's a lot easier to pull modelers up but what if you're doing a human what if you're doing something like this character here in this case it's most likely a lot easier to sculpt that up this is because you're dealing with with one incredibly difficult to shape you're not dealing with like three different pieces which are on top of it you're dealing with one cohesive shape so the way you would traditionally do poly modeling is let's say we have the eyes here now you would you would take take the whole here and I'll extrude it scale it in and then I would just move it in and you will start to refine the shape so it works properly you do the same thing with the mouth here you would take this you would extrude it scale it in and I start to refine this shape and now you can kind of start to see the problems of poly modeling is that it's really hard to refine a shape with these tools here they're just not meant for it you know if we were to go in here and start to start to properly refine this this is really genuinely tricky to do and it was a lot of tweaking a lot of soft selection and you know just in general a lot of mystery and it's just not going to look as good as it's gonna look if you are dealing with them with proper sculpting tools yes it's a very mechanical process I would say where and that's why I feel like it lends so well to hard surface because you know you're you're ending up with these very mechanical surfaces that are perfect most of the time while they have undulation nothing is perfect but like the base shape it's easier to make that perfect if your poly modeling in you know something like Gollum was done traditionally with poly modeling before the advent of ZBrush or sculpting tools and you know that's a nightmare to do just because it's so it's so advanced to do characters with poly modeling and that's what people used to do until sculpting tools came along yeah we both done a lot of poly modeling for for anything and the advantage of that is it's kind of like the core modeling skill set it means if you you're good at poly modeling you can model most things but it's it's very problematic if you're if you're trying to sculpt it sculpting on head or hand is we done in something like ZBrush so here we have basically a ball of clay and it's a fundamentally different approach to how to how to approach it now I'm just approaching from a shape point of view I'm not worried all about justice deform well like it's the pulled it tight whatever it is the only thing I'm thinking about right now is what's the form so this is a far more artistic way of working just because you're thinking about the emotional quote like what kind of character is the sky you're thinking about all the subtle little things well what are you modeling and blended like we just didn't know you're dealing with all of that at the same time you're dealing with you still have to think about what's the background of the character like what how old list character all these kind of things while you were thinking about the edge flow and the shape of it and it's almost impossible to do that to the correct level you can see that the moment like Seaver started to become really popular as a tool the characters just became better for film and games because now you could you could really really refine them with like in terms of scope the instead of just worrying about the technical things so I would see brushing sculpting you are you were first doing the design then you're doing it apology afterwards and in traditional modeling you're worrying about that at the exact same time it just makes it really hard yeah I hope you can see why this is beneficial to like split up the process especially when you're working on characters just because it's a lot easier to manage one thing compared to two especially to two things that are really advanced like topology well making up topology isn't necessarily advanced but you have to place it correctly so if you're worrying about placing topology correctly and getting nice form and my silhouette at the same time as you're trying to get the design to look right you're just sort of handicapping yourself on the other hand like is say you're doing a car you don't want the organic feel of what you get and see we're sure you can do some hard surface in ZBrush you could use it for hard surface concept thing but it's actually like an interesting observation I've made is sort of the hard surface stuff that you get out of see brush I feel like after Sieber sort of came to light and people started using it for her surface our surface designs changed like before that you know you have that very like classic avatar mech thing that has the giant knife that slices the Panther very boxy very mech like after that is sort of transitioned into this I like to call it organic hard surface will you achieve a lot of these organic shapes that people then shade to be hard surface so a lot of these shapes might not make a lot of sense like how would you make those you would have to like cast them instead of you know you have like plate steel and you were like cut it out willed it together so after Sieber sort of light into the territory it also spiced up hard surface quite a lot but there are things where you just wouldn't use it for like cars for example yeah you can you clearly see this in games like doom where you see all the armor it is almost like it looks like it's sculpted with weed like the the clay brushes and then you have a trim dynamic on top of it this is kind of bubbly yeah exactly the reason you can tell is because it will be almost impossible to actually do that with traditional poly modeling it's just so tricky to get that to look right so yeah it's it's made a huge difference on the entire industry to be able to do it but don't don't underestimate how important poly modeling is as well it's really one of the core modeling skills for it I've seen now recently where this is what we're going to see where's cowboy territory where you have people now who they know every single button and see brush and they know all that and they were trying to use ZBrush for everything it's it's like the example of if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail or you shouldn't be a hammer you should look at you should look at whatever situation this situation requires and do it from there I was speaking to a guy's new years ago and he was a massive see brush cowboy and we were talking about like how would you model this glass and and almost like well you should just start with a cylinder extruder up and give it some thickness and the glass is done in like five minutes but he was saying that no you should use a shadow box and you sure that you boolean's and all that kind of stuff and then you should use a way to put like C or mesh rafter words and then you use UV master on it to make the Eevee's which in that case makes sense if you are that the ZBrush hammer and everything looks like a Seavers nail but in reality there's so many other ways of doing it instead of just trying to use the ZBrush tools for it they're like a very popular sort of method I don't know if DreamWorks still uses it and picks tower still uses but I they did at some point you know they did clay maquettes and the clay maquette sort of like served as the base for you know for the character whether it's sculpting in real life or sculpting in ZBrush it doesn't really matter if you're doing something like characters then the sculpting works like Justin allows you to nail that design before ever worrying about topology you can also combine the two as well we recently have a chat with dynamic and one things he's talking about is he keeps his he keeps this topology really low rest so I might be doing a sculpt where you're you're sculpting up to get in main shapes and get all the volumes to be right and then you Rita polio scene with a fairly low risk age this or that you're now smoothing out all the undulation like Morgan was talking before if you try to sculpt a car in in ZBrush it's just not going to work you're gonna have way too many small imperfections all over the place so by having a more low-risk age for this you are you're just making sure that you can't have these crazy shapes you can't have all the brush strokes and custom the low topology literally doesn't allow for it so yeah that's essentially in the differences between poly modeling and and sculpting really hope this has been illuminating for people it's been a question we had a fair few times why would you scope and you can pull a model and why don't you just model every single prop you ever have in ZBrush so I hope this has given you some some light on the subject so thank you so much for watching and make sure to leave a comment like and subscribe and we will see you next time if you're looking for training or high quality assets make sure to stop by the flip normals marketplace and if you're interested in supporting us by buying our merchandise you can check that out in the description below

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 450,561

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, foundry, pixologic, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cube brush, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru, cgi, blender 2.8, blender 3d, b3d, Blender tutorial, blender tutorials, learning blender

Id: EvzQYzczUH8

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020