I saw no difference in the witcher from any other game. all I saw was a computer doing math

you say you should not do drawings in 3d and the spark of life

paintings and drawings dont move but you can look at them and not a have problem with them because there done by hand. you can not fake the human effort that is put into it. thats what the viewer connects with

drawings in 3d. thats been done more than once. I did a quick one after reading this

2d drawing in 3d. did not try to match the drawings to the camera. would look a 100 times better if I matched the drawings to the camera

apparently you have yet to learn what anything means. the image you posted is limited to what the mesh can support. that is nowhere in the vicinity of anything. and I said a character that cylinder and round object are not characters. using more than one object makes more sense   

and my rigs are completely non standard. they address the issue of taking any shape. for some engines I have to use work around to get them to import properly

you keep making an argument by going into the math. of how something is supposed to work.

you dont do 2d animation but you try to argue 2d and 3d animation are the same.

I dont know how much experience you have with nurbs and patches. but you know there not sculpting. you should get experience with the subject before you speak about it

when 3d came into existance there was only polygon modeling nurbs were created right after polygon specifically to address the limitations of polygon modeling. nurbs does not produce a hard edge. its always round and soft. and its made out of triangles. and the meshes were high poly. they looked good were undeniably smooth. but were too high to rig.

so a low poly version of the high poly version had to be made. now when I say low poly. I mean low polygon count. not it was box or edge modeled using polygons. you could turn on 3d snaps and draw splines directly on the high poly 3d model and a patch surface was made from the drawn splines. that perfectly matched the high poly model. since all your doing is drawing splines its fast. this is how retopolgy was done. this is well before the first sculpting program came into existence

there was still another use for the high poly model. render the high poly model out then paint it onto the low poly version. if you ever wondered how games before normal mapping were able to get the low poly models to look good. that is how

and there was one other use for the high poly model use it for animation in rendered cutscenes. but you did not animate it directly. because the polygon count was too high. use the low poly skinned version to animate the high poly version. using a modifier that lets you deform one mesh based on another mesh. again this is all before normal mapping. after normal mapping there was no need to do this  

not some of the time, every time I show someone. that has only used  sculpting progams. nurbs or patches. there response is always ooh thats sculpting.

the result from drawing something over and over will always be better than a single model that is animated

7 hours ago, tigral said:

you say you should not do drawings in 3d and the spark of life

paintings and drawings dont move but you can look at them and not a have problem with them because there done by hand. you can not fake the human effort that is put into it. thats what the viewer connects with

I said the spark like effect in hand drawn animation causes sickness if emulated on a 3D model. 3D models also look weird when they suddenly stop moving. Think of a realistic human face that is jittering the whole time, looking at it causes discomfort.

This is because of the uncanny valley effect. The more realistic something looks the more realistic it has to act. Think of a stick-man drawing vs a cartoon drawing.A stick man it only needs to move for it's animation, a cartoon drawing needs to "act" out it's actions to look believable.

Your 3D drawing there is still clearly a drawing to anyone who looks at it, so you have no fear of invoking the uncanny valley effect.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

drawings in 3d. thats been done more than once. I did a quick one after reading this

Yes, never said it hasn't. Just that using the normal curve to 3D has limits that prevented me from calling the result a 3D model. My code turns the drawing into what can technically be considered a 3D model instead of a 3D drawing.

Here is a image of how it works.

A 3D model is a object made from from 3D objects, your 3D character above is made from the empty space in-between the 3D model and as such isn't technically a 3D model.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

you dont do 2d animation but you try to argue 2d and 3d animation are the same.

No I am not a professional 2D animator, however I never said I don't do 2D animation

I learned 2D long before I went to study 3D animation, I believe no one should try to run before they learn to walk. I never said 2D animation is the same as 3D, I said 3D is derived from 2D.

3D animation is 2D animation with a extra dimension added onto it. That is why animators aren't called 3D animators, because you will never find a 3D animation artist that can't also do motion graphics and 2D hand animation. One of the requirements of becoming a 3D animator is learning 2D animation; you don't have to master it however you do need to learn it.

You said I had to remodel it, if you made clear that I could have done a hand animation I would have informed you that a 3min walking animation isn't enough work for me to get bored with it.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

dont know how much experience you have with nurbs and patches. but you know there not sculpting. you should get experience with the subject before you speak about it

I am a 3D artist, I long ago learned everything about 3D modeling history looking for some kind of technique that others could have missed.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

when 3d came into existance there was only polygon modeling nurbs were created right after polygon specifically to address the limitations of polygon modeling...

You said spline modeling was sculpting, even when it wasn't. You also said splines where used to generate meshes at real-time even when it wasn't. Now your saying that nurbs where created before sculpting when it wasn't and that retopology was made for nurbs even when it wasn't and even when nurbs never need retopology because they where made to adapt.

First there was solid state modeling -> first sculpting tools -> then Catmull Clark introduced subdivision modeling(1978-1979) -> First subD sculpting tools and first retopology tools -> Nurbs (1989 - 1990) -> lazer scanners go commercial -> 3D additive sculpting.

3D models from photos is still not at the point where it's commercial yet, although there are artist using it to great effect so it's clearly the next step.

Nurbs is based on the B-Spline idea of Catmull, NURBS = Non-uniform rational B-spline. Sculpting as most people know it became popular with Catmall's sub-D, years before NURBS.

Nurbs was invented for free form curves and as a solution to the retopology problem. You see nurbs start high poly but can be set lower poly without loosing quality, because the path acts like a frame; it's the subD idea just inverted.

The above image shows the same NURBS curve at  low and high resolution. That is why NURBS are still used in some Car games, you only need to model a car once and you can get a retopology and LODs from the same model by just setting the two resolutions lower. SubD only allows the setting of one resolution, so it's hard to get near the poly count you want.(SubD = 1->4->8->16->32... NURBS -> 1->2->4->6->8->12->16->28->32...)

About Retopology: It's easy to mistake retopology as only a way of reducing poly count, it's more than that. It's a way to construct the topology into a usable format. Retopology of a model results in a model that is easier to animate, easier to texture and is easier to render.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

since all your doing is drawing splines its fast.

No, it's slow. That is why people complain about Blender's retopology, it's as slow to draw topology as it is to model it; I know I have timed myself doing it. Compared to modern retopology tools like Zbrush has that is just one click, drawing and modeling takes ages.

About Sculpting: 3D sculpting has been around for almost as long as 3D modeling, in the start it only allowed you to move polygons around like this:

The results where a easy way to shape a model, the above model is the same sphere in a new shape, yet no way to add details. Sub-D improved 3D modeling yet even at that stage it still wasn't very useful yet. Zbrush and it's way to increase poly count by reconstructing models is what made sculpting useful. Zbrushes DynaMesh is what allowed more modern sculpting tools to even outgrow the old modeling tools. (By the way this took 40min to do, I am counting it as my 3D modeling exercise for today.)

7 hours ago, tigral said:

there was still another use for the high poly model. render the high poly model out then paint it onto the low poly version. if you ever wondered how games before normal mapping were able to get the low poly models to look good. that is how

They didn't paint it, they baked it. Just like you bake your normal map, gloss map, metal map and any other map. Getting the details of high quality models onto low is how baking was invented and Normal where done first long before color or any other info. It was with perpixel shaders that allowed normal maps instead of baking the normals into the lower poly mesh.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

and there was one other use for the high poly model use it for animation in rendered cutscenes...

Tekken is known for doing this, the bad results they get by cutting corners makes them a laughing stock in the 3D communities. Most games have separate studios for cinematic cut scenes. In game cut scenes uses a 3D model that is just a higher poly than the normal ones, they are made the same way as the rest of the game models. I would know making these models for cut scenes was my previous job, did I mention I am a 3D modeler?

7 hours ago, tigral said:

not some of the time, every time I show someone. that has only used  sculpting progams. nurbs or patches. there response is always ooh thats sculpting.

Hit them with a hammer when they do so. NURBS modeling is NURBS modeling it's a field on it's own and a requirement by some car game developers if you want to work as a 3D artist for them.

7 hours ago, tigral said:

the result from drawing something over and over will always be better than a single model that is animated

After I finish this 3min walk I will compare it to a fully modeled character with a walking animation I will make using all my tools to see if this is true; I don't think it is.

I'd definitely listen to the advice given above. I did animation myself for a time and it's hard. Just keep trying and you'll get to where you want it to be.

you cant call catmull which is commonly known as meshsmooth, sculpting. this has no business being mentioned in relation to sculpting. that uses the same hard edge polygon model that was used when 3d was created. meshsmooth just hides the polygon model underneath. polygon modeling is like modeling with bricks

you dont know 2d animation if you did. you would not think 2d and 3d animation are equal.a mesh and bones cannot equal the motion of a line. that defies basic comprehension.

spline and nurbs in every 3d program is actually different. you dont seem to know that. the only thing they all have in common is you draw lines and make a surface.

you state common everyday knowledge. that everyone who had any contact with 3d knows. as if its a revealation. meshsmooth was so commonly used that does not need to be stated. but it was no where in the vicinity of scultping. baking maps was so commonly used. it does not need to be stated. and the diffuse baked maps were also uglier than the original maps they were based off.

painted maps did not have that problem

If the only reason you took a interest in modeling other than polygon was hoping to find an advantage. that may be why you did not learn it. when I started I actually wanted to draw in 3d. I was disappointed to find all I could do was box or edge model a polygon. I saw meshsmooth when it was introduced. again all that did was hide the polygon model underneath.

now when spline and nurbs were introduced. that is what I was looking for from the first time I touched a 3d program. I jumped all over it. but there were no tutorials. I had to figure it out myself. and it was frustrating. I should have been able to draw in 3d as easily as on paper. but that was not the case. because no one naturally thinks in terms of a 3d space. unless your using a 3d program you dont have to.

I figured it out by looking at a diagram of a drawing. when you draw a character more than once you have to diagram where everything goes to make sure the next drawing lines up. a line for where the eyes go, nose, lips everything. I did the same exact thing in 3d. so I have everything lined up right. but its still not three dimensional yet. the last piece was. I realized everything in 3d is either a circle or square. draw 2 more line to round the shape out.

and thats it. once I had that figured out I could draw  anything in 3d

wth the stick figures one looks like an extruded spline the other looks like a blob model

you say that model took 40 minutes to sculpt. that should not have taken that long. but this took 15 minutes. and I wasnt rushing. the entire head is made from a single drawn spline. I start off with the head shape. instead of looking for it. its a patch surface. changes are a simple matter