Charecter Consistency Questions

[elery1]

I have been using the demo for about 4 months. I am just now beginning to "get it".

I want to use Zbrush to illustrate children's books. This means I will have to to make textured characters in different illustrations look the same in many different poses.

What is the best way to go about this?

(Method 1) I know you can pose an adaptive skinned z-shpear model, but the texture (and sometimes the skin itself) gets messed up if it bends to far.

(Method 2) Someone said you can create and texture characters in separate body parts and then position them in the scene that way. If I do that, how do I blend the seems between where the different body parts come together?

(Method 3)
Could I export a textured model into Hash's Animation Master, give it bones and a pose, then import it back into Zbrush with out losing the textures?

This is a great program. Can't wait to start using it at work.

Thanks for the help,
Shaun

[aurick]

Thank you for using ZBrush!

You have some well thought-out possibilities there, and the answers are pretty simple. :)

Method 1 :: This is pretty much how you describe it. If your new pose is different enough from the original that the vertices change at all, then the texture will no longer wrap correctly.

Method 2 :: There are two ways to do this. As a pre-render process you would make sure that the pieces intersect on all three axes. Use the Transform>Info sliders if you are having trouble keeping track of depth. It's adviseable to put each piece on a separate layer with markers until you are satisfied with the layout. Then merge the layers, making sure that ZADD and MRGB are active in the Draw palette. You will now be able to use the Blur and Smudge tools to fix seams. If they don't work, it's because of depth differences between the two parts.

You can also save the seams to fix as a post-render effect. Export your rendered image, clear the canvas, and import the image back into the Texture palette. Now select the Flat Color material and press Ctrl+F to fill the layer. Since everything will now be at the same depth and using the same material, Blur and Smudge will work flawlessly to remove the seams. In addition, you will get great results from all of the other pixol-changing brushes (Highlighter, Shading Enhancer, etc.), which makes it easy to add that extra bit of life to your scene. ZBrush makes a very powerful post-render tool!

Method 3 :: Yes. There are topics in the QuickLinks about using ZBrush with AM.

Method 2 is really only practical with the commercial version as it would be difficult to create all of the tools in a single session, and you can't import textures to do the post-render effects. Method 3, of course, cannot be done with the demo at all. But it can be done with the commercial version just fine. :)

Hope that helps!

[elery1]

Thanks for the quick reply. I think I am going to start with method 2.

One last concern, I am running the demo on an 800mhz machine with 128 megs of RAM with no problems.

If I start using Zbrush professionally I will need to work on images at least 3000 pixels wide. Now, I have read that Zbrush taxes you RAM more than your processor...so if I just buy more memory will I be OK? Or will I need a new system?

Thanks again,

Shaun

[aurick]

Hi Shaun,

This is a hard one to give a good recommendation on, and only you can really answer the question because you know better than anyone else what your circumstances are.

What type of RAM does your computer use? If it is SDRAM, then you can pick up more very inexpensively. It will certainly help, but you will probably still be handicapped by the slow processor. However, if your computer uses SIMMs or DIMMs, then you will find that any appreciable amount of RAM will probably cost more than a whole new system!

Take a gander at your local computer store. Even low end computers priced around $300 to $600 will probably still be many times superior to what you are currently running. It's hard today to find a computer that has less than 1.2GHZ processors, and most also have DDRAM which is twice as fast as SDRAM.

So what you really need to do is look at the minimum amount that a new computer would cost and weigh its benefits of faster processor and faster RAM against how much it would cost to upgrade what you already have.

I hope that helps some!