Posts Tagged ‘ZBrush’

When I was halfway through the sculpting phase I decided to improve my UV Layout for my darling. Originally I had settled on letting ZBrush create the UV map for me, using GUV tiles. But then I thought Nah, they don’t look very pretty. ZBrush GUV tiles does create a very nice distortion free UV Map, so it’s technically a very good UV Map, but not very easy on the human eye if you want to take the UV Canvas into Photoshop for further editing after you have left ZBrush.

So I went back to my base mesh in LightWave and had a proper UV unwrap session with it instead.

The unwrapped UV layout for the Destrachan

As can be seen, my unwrapped UV Map is so much easier to paint on than the abstract ZBrush generated map if I decide to paint or do other work on the maps down the road. To create my UV Maps in LightWave I use a very nice free plugin called PLG UV Tools which just rocks for UV creation.

I have always thought of creating UV Maps as the most boring and uncreative part of the 3D process, but the PLG Tools has completely changed that for me. It just gives me great UV Maps in no time so I can concentrate on the more creative parts.

In less than no time I had decided on where my seams and cuts shall be and generated a more or less distortion free UV map out of it. Then run the Relax UV command and follow up with the Pack UV Chart to get as effective placement in the UV space as possible. Here is the base mesh with an UV Checker pattern applied after I had finished my new UV Layout.

Look Ma, almost no stretching!

Gotta love how easy it is to swap out an UV Map in ZBrush for a new one in the middle of a sculpting session.

Anyway, the checker render above is the last render of the base mesh. Now there is only the fun parts left, sculpted and painted versions of this guy!

I have an UV Layout that I am very pleased with. And the sculpting is almost finished. I’ll continue sculpting in the finer details tonight and shortly be back with some images of the final sculpture so I can move on to the painting phase.

Working Music: Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out Of This Country

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Creature, LightWave, Texturing, Work in Progress, ZBrush

Time for a new Destrachan update. Another completely unrelated project with a tight deadline came in between, but today I’ve continued working on my Destrachan creature. The project that came in between is finished, and I’ll be able to post about it in two weeks when I’m allowed to publish it.

Anyway, continuing from the last post, where I had modeled the base mesh in LightWave 3D, I’ve now brought this guy into ZBrush and started sculpting. I’ve worked my way from subdivision level 1 and are currently sculpting at level 4 and are working with around 90.000 polygons at the moment.

The first ZBrush sculpting session of the Destrachan

At level 4 I’ve got enough polygons to start getting finer details sculpted into my creature like veins, tendons, skin folds, muscle definitions and the like. I intend to keep sculpting all the way up to level 7 to get this creature extremely detailed down to pores and skin texture, before I export it back as a low resolution mesh with a displacement map to use in LightWave. Oh well, I just wanted to post this update tonight, and will continue sculpting for a few hours now and will hopefully be able to post the final sculpt tomorrow, so I can start painting my little cute and cosy darling.

Sculpting Music: Lasse Lindh - (Self titled album)

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Creature, Sculpting, ZBrush

Sunday morning. I woke up early today, and just felt like spending this lovely morning doodling around a bit in ZBrush. This is what came out after a quick session.

A quick ZBrush Pin-Up doodle I made this morning

It’s based on the character from my last work in progress post which I’ve been working on in LightWave 3D. I just exported her out of LightWave at her current state and sculpted away for a while in ZBrush. This gave me the opportunity to get into using sub-tools, transpose control as well as polygon painting and materials in ZBrush at the same time. Well, this was just something I made for fun to get the day started. I’ll post my progress of the LightWave version of this character this evening.

Morning doodling Music: Camera Obscura - Let’s Get out of this Country

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Pin-up, Render, ZBrush

It was time! Time at last to bring one of my creations into another renderer than ZBrush. I doodled up something in ZBrush and moved it into LightWave 3D for rendering this time. Below is a rendering of my only 2470 polygons large mesh inside of LightWave with a displacement map.

First try to combine ZBrush and LightWave 3D

It did actually take some time and experimentation until I got it right, but in the end I did find a good flow for the process of getting ZBrush data into LightWave 3D.

I started with a quick doodling session in ZBrush. The usual procedure. Draw out a couple of ZSpheres to get a base mesh, divided it a couple of times, and sculpted for about 30 minutes to get something with enough details in to work with and find my flow between the applications.

It took a few turns back and forth and quite some head scratching until it worked smoothly. I ended up working in this way. First the ZBrush part.

• Bring the mesh down to the lowest resolution.
• Group the UV tiles (It’s not a pretty UV map created this way, but it was okay for this experiment as I wasn’t about to work on the map in any other application anyway).
• Enable adaptive displacement, raise the intensity to max, enable displacement mode and finally set my output resolution to 4096 pixels and run create displacement map.
• Export my base mesh with flipped quad polygons as an .obj file and also export the displacement map flipped vertically as a tif image.

And we’re done in ZBrush, let’s move on to the LightWave part.

• I imported the .obj in Modeler and turned on subpatching, saved it as an .lwo and moved on to Layout.
• In Layout I made a displacement node flow, consisting of the displacement map image fed into a subtract node. As medium gray in the displacement map is pushed out in LightWave and it’s supposed to be 0 in ZBrush measurements, I subtracted 0.5 from it. Then a multiply node to control the height of the displacement and finally I ended up feeding it into a scale node combined with the normal spot info node. Done, a perfect ZBrush displacement inside of LightWave.

Before rendering I enabled LightWave’s APS system, Adaptive Pixel Subdivision, and set a gradient on the Angle to the camera’s Z-Axis to get enough polygons for detailing at render time without killing the engine. And for fun I also slapped on a SSS shader node flow to make it a bit more interesting. F9! And we have a scene with 2470 polygons rendered as 1.4 million polygons with lot’s of lovely details!

Here is a tiny visual step by step guide all the way from ZBrush into LightWave ending up with an Ambient Occlusion render.

Visual Steps from ZBrush to displaced LightWave render

I hope this information will be found useful to some people.

Anyway, next time I will make the final step, bringing one of my 3D meshes out from LightWave and into ZBrush, sculpt details on it there and then bring it back to LightWave again for rendering.

Oh, and by the way, the swedish Göteborg blogmap at bloggkartan.se.

Doodling Music: Air - Pocket Symphony

Tags: 3D, CG, Creature, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Tutorial, Workflow, ZBrush

A small update on the doodle I posted earlier today.

A test render of the Chupacabra doodle

I wasn’t completely happy with the look I got from the default rendering settings in ZBrush, so I spent some time reading up on the different settings and how they worked. So I just wanted to post a new version of this doodle with some improved settings. I’ve turned on edge anti aliasing here to get rid of the jaggies, added some perspective, improved the shadow settings. And also just had some fun painting my sculpture for a few minutes to make it a bit more interesting. Enjoy this cutie! :)

Still listening to: Koop - Koop Islands

Tags: 3D, CG, Creature, Sculpting, ZBrush

I’ve continued my explorations into the ZBrush universe and this is what popped out. I love the freedom to just mindlessly sculpt in this application. Hope you enjoy it.

Chupacabra ZBrush Doodle

I’ve been into improving my ZBrush skills for about a week now I can say this software is truly amazing and will for sure improve my existing workflow. It’s so nice not having to fight the software, and I’m feeling free in the application and have found myself thinking more like a traditional sculptor. Yes, I am really having fun! :)

Another shot of the Chupacabra ZBrush Doodle

While working on this piece I realized I have to think a little bit more about topology of the base mesh, before jumping into the the finer detail sculpting. This will be less of a problem when I get into importing my meshes I create in LightWave, as I am very careful with the topology modeling in LightWave. But this sculpt was, like my second doodle two days ago, made completely inside of ZBrush, with the base mesh built from ZSpheres. When working with the details around the eyelid area as well as the genitals I realized I didn’t have enough polygons driving the sculpt in the background to be able to work as precise as I needed to do there. I could divide the mesh another time, but then I would get a great deal of details added to areas where I didn’t need it. Waste of resources in other words.

Well, this was doodle number three, so I am still learning, and on my next ZB doodle I’ll not make this mistake again, and make sure I put denser details in the areas where I need it from the beginning. Here is some screenshots from the different stages. ZSpheres -> Adaptive skinning -> Sculpting in the details -> Render in a clay material.

The Chupacabra Process from ZSphere to Final Mesh

Gonna read up a bit on working with topology inside ZBrush next, to have better control of my sculpts I create inside ZBrush, and see what I come up with next.

ZBrush sculpting music: Koop - Waltz for Koop

Tags: 3D, CG, Creature, Sculpting, ZBrush

I’ve continued my exploration within ZBrush 3, and had a one hour doodling session today (I haven’t forgot about my other projects, updates will come shortly on those as well). But I am really falling in love with the intuitive way of working in ZBrush so I will continue investing time to really get confident with this package, so I can use it in many of my upcoming projects.

A fantasy creature doodle

The ZBrush doodle I posted yesterday was my first attempt to create something in zbrush 3, and was done with blocking out the shape with a sphere brush, convert it to a polymesh and then pull, push and drag around the clay from there. It got quite messy and lot’s of stretched and overlapping polygons. It’s almost impossible to control the topology working in that way.

So today I improved my workflow in ZBrush and used zspheres instead and got into the habit of using them to create a much better base mesh to work from. Nice and controlled topology, much quicker to work with and which therefore also resulted in a much nicer result. From the zsphere created base mesh I made a few divisions to get the details I needed to sculpt out all the finer details.

From ZSpheres to Final Mesh

And from starting with an empty canvas to the creature I ended up took about an hour. Amazing, this would have take so much longer to model and sculpt in a traditional 3D package. Can’t wait to continue getting deeper into zbrush and start exchanging data between LightWave 3D and ZBrush.

Todays doodling music: Calexico - Feast of Wire

Tags: 3D, CG, Creature, Sculpting, ZBrush

As ZBrush 3 was recently released, I’ve finally started taking the time needed to fully learn this lovely piece of software. Lot’s of more things for me to explore in this package, but I am getting there. Here is a doodle I made this morning just after I woke up while drinking my morning coffee. This weekend have been dedicated to ZBrush.

Learning ZBrush - My first lame attempt to do something

This doodling took about 30 minutes from an empty canvas for me to sculpt. I made it entirely inside of ZBrush beginning with the sphere brush and working from there. Just having fun with the sculpting tools. I don’t know what it is really, I was just playing around. It does take some time getting used to this way of working, being used to dragging and pulling vertices for years, and now moving over to this form of almost clay sculpting.

But I love it, and I can’t wait to continue digging into ZBrush and making it a major part of my pipeline for my pieces.

Doodling Music: Slayradio

Tags: 3D, CG, Creature, Sculpting, ZBrush

ZBrush 3 - Released Today!

The development phase has been going on for years and what originally was supposed to be ZBrush 2.5 now finally hit the streets as a more significant upgrade, and got the 3.0 extension instead. Pixologic has worked hard on this update and it has been well worth the wait! Woohoo!

I just got my upgrade link about an hour ago, so I have just started to check it out, but my first impression is Wow! I’ve had a ZBrush license for quite some time, but I never got around to learn it fully, but now I’ll definitely invest the time needed to learn and utilize this package in my coming projects. This will marriage nicely with my Wacom and I really want this to be an essential part of my pipeline from now on. ZBrush doodlings will come in the doodle category shortly! For Sure!

You don’t get closer to working with real clay, in a digital environment, than this.
This sculpt and painting package is truly awesome!

• Pixologic website
• ZBrush 3 Info

ZBrush 3 first impression music: Belle & Sebastian - The Boy with the Arab Strap

Tags: 3D, CG, Painting, Pipeline, Sculpting, Workflow, ZBrush