Rare is the model that I allow go over 1M triangles). My pipeline generally goes a little something like this: 1.) Rough concept sketch and collection of image reference 2.) Low-Resolution geometry/placeholders/roughing in 3d volumes in ZBrush 3.) High-Resolution solid modeling assets in Blender, then bring them into ZBrush to replace placeholder geometry 4.) High-Resolution sculpting of organic objects/characters/creatures in Zbrush 5.) Hi-resolution surface/panel detail pass in ZBrush 6.) 3d print preparation consisting of boolean merging/subtracting the various model components into single-shelled (no intersecting geometry) solid components based on how they will be cast (or just merge them into one solid body if you are only printing, and not casting duplicates) 6.) Decimation and STL file export from ZBrush, then final STL cleanup/error repair in Netfabb (free basic version available) or Meshlab (fewer polys = fewer STL errors… for a fully detailed 32mm scale character, I target around 400-600k triangles. To answer your question about process, there are a lot of parallels between character modelling for video games and 3d print in the early stages, but they diverge later in the process in ways that I find can give video game character artists a lot of grief in their first attempts at modeling for 3d print. A very detailed 3d print character might be 20-30million polys prior to decimation, and 500k-1M polys when sent to the printer. A high-resolution character in a video game might be 10-15k polys after retopology. All the detail that you wish to be present in your printed 3d model, MUST be present in the geometry itself, and that means a very detailed, organic 3d-print model is likely to be far, far heavier, geometrically, than other kinds of model. One very important difference between video game/film character modeling and 3d-print character modeling is that a 3d-print character model cannot benefit from visual tricks like smooth shading, baking normal maps to a low-poly retopologised model, subdividing only during renders, etc. You may find that you do not need to create insanely detailed models, though, in which case Blender may be enough. It can manage a couple million polys at a time in Sculpt mode, but that doesn’t always cover my needs.
As a beginner, though, I think Blender could definitely be used to create a 3d-print ready miniature from start-to-finish, but you might have to translate some of my ZBrush steps into Blender.Ī primary reason I do not bother creating fully-detailed print models in Blender is that VBOs are not yet implented in Edit Mode, so Blender is too slow to properly edit/boolean very heavy (multi-million poly) models. To do this on a production scale, I find ZBrush to be essential for my work, and use Blender as my main supplementary poly modeling tool.
#Blender 3d character modeling professional
I’m a professional character artist/product designer in the hobby wargaming industry, so I’ll try to answer your questions and give you a few pointers.