An Old Withering Tree

[polaroid29]

Hey guys, hope everybody is well! I started working on my second Zbrush sculpt and safe to say I am addicted. This is a piece I started the other day with the intention of taking it all the way to full render and illustration, and hopefully posting WIP images and getting your criticism will motivate me to update regularly and see it through to the end. This is the very initial adaptive skin after the zsphere base, with no work done yet except a little surface noise for the render. Hope you all like it so far, and any comments or criticisms no matter how harsh are much appreciated





All the best
-Robert

[Santis]

It's looking very good so far
With a couple of more subdivisions, branches also pointing backward and forward(maybe that's not your intention), and a nice paint over with an environment this would become be a really great piece!

[polaroid29]

@Santis thanks very much man glad you're liking it. That's the plan so far, I've been mocking up a spooky paint environment to put this thing into.

I'm having some poly issues though, because of the amount of zspheres I used to make this thing, it's running at like 500,000 poly's on subd 1. I'll only be able to subdivide it twice more before my computer blows up. Is there a really easy way to retopoligize this, especially all those tiny branches? Or should I split the branches into separate subtools?

[Santis]

If I were you I would try a local subdivision on the thickest parts. (mask the branches and subdivide)

[polaroid29]

That definitely helped out, thanks I was able to redistribute the polys a lot better and more evenly throughout the mesh. It's at about 3million right now and I can't reconstruct subdivs because there are some tris somewhere I guess, but oh well. Stage one of sculpting! Any crits?

[polaroid29]

An update on starting the detailing process, also updated the original post with my concept. Severely lowered the blobbing of all the branches and added a little twisting. Started working on adding the bark too, which I'm not sure if I like yet or if it should be a little more stylized to fit with the structure. Any crits would be really helpful thanks guys.

[Santis]

Moving in the right direction!

[polaroid29]

Thanks again! I've run into a problem though it seems. I knew having so many poly's in the first few subd levels was going to come back and bite me in the ass . It's too dense so Zbrush runs out of virtual memory everytime I try to use UVmaster or when I try to generate a displacement map. I can't reconstruct subdiv because apparently the zspheres generate a few tris that I didn't know about. Any advice on what I can do to fix it? Retopology for all those little branches seems like it would take twice as long as the whole project combined!

[tchaikovsky2]

Looks good so far. I like the overall stylized design.

As for the problem you're having, you could use your Zsphere base mesh, append it as a subtool, divide it up a few times and project it onto the detailed model. That would fix the no reconstruction problem. But if you run out of memory again, well... Only more RAM will help you there. :P

I'm just hoping you have a backup at the Zsphere stage... :|

[tchaikovsky2]

Also, you could use some external modelling app to remove some edge loops from the tiny branches.
That might considerably reduce your base polycount.

[tyrellcorp]

does that work? masking an area then subdividing ? wouldnt you have issues at the boarder?

[polaroid29]

@tchaikovsky2 Thank you! I'm gonna try your suggestions, the only problem is my original zsphere base comes out to 500,000 polys :x so I can only divide it once, which doesn't give me enough to project the finer details for the hi-res mesh. Your warm robot scene is really amazing by the way, went straight into the inspiration folder. Fantastic work

@tyrellcorp yep it works, pretty well too. you can see a small border, but as long as the poly difference isn't huge, a little smoothing works just fine.

[polaroid29]

Hey guys, got a little discouraged trying to learn the program a little better and figure out all of these technical issues, so only a small update from me. I'm determined to finish it and hopefully make it good though, as it'll be my first ever illustration . I think I'm finished with most of the tree detailing, so I'm just messing around with prop ideas and boxing them out at this point, nothing big yet. Any crits or opinions would be much much appreciated!

[polaroid29]

Some more work on the terrain. Excuse the terrible shadows haha

[hendrik F]

I like where this is going. looks like it could be something out of a tim burton movie