Dave Langley - Digital Scultping Thread

[zber2]

Excellent!

[Sebcesoir]

Thats really great...
it would deserve a nice metallic shader.

That might have been complicate to get the scale of each piece consistent...

[DLangley]

DMan3d; thanks, I look forward to seeing what hard surface project you will work on.

3Point14; thanks, I'm a stickler for detail like that.

ZBer2; thanks.

Sebcesoir; thank you, I will defintely need to start thinking about shaders soon. I was fortunate to have some great reference after scouring the web. Some pieces were still a bit of guess work but based on photo reference.

[Dragon]

Congratulations on posting correctly modeled mechanical parts! eg: the safety wired bolts that have the correct placement of the wire to hold them after torquing to specs........
I see so many, so so so many posts with mechanical thingys that are just not practical like mecha suits that will not bend at the knees or anywhere else. Vehicles with suspension that defy all laws of physics etc etc.
Anyway nice job.

I second that! Man this is just amazing DLangley. Man, can ya imagine DOD manuals in 3D instead of 2D like we had to look at (and so are current service members)? Hook them up with Ipad's, a 3D viewer and detailed weapons as you are creating... it would be aswome.

[Crazy Horse]

Very well done! looks really nice and the fact that it is 100% zbrush is amazing! is it moastly shadow bow? I find it hard to use since it need a lot of polys to get good result which really crashes my machine. look forward to seeing more on this!

peace

[DLangley]

Dragon; thanks once again; 3d manuals on iPads is a cool idea. Imagine the accuracy one could achieve given a correct set of blueprints.

Crazy Horse; thanks, I used shadow box for only two or three parts. Most of it was done by extracting a shape from a plane using masking with E Smt, S Smt and Thick all set to 0, then storing a morph target for the extracted piece, clearing the mask that comes along for the ride, and using the move transpose to pull it out some, then creating a difference mesh. It's really the same concept as shadowbox but on a flat plane and you can get a much higher resolution.

You can also use this technique on other primatives. For the Barrel Jacket I used a cylinder primative and radial symmetry set to 3 to create the masks for the holes. However when you mask radially around a cylinder the mask is drawn directly through the model to the opposite side resulting in not 3 but 6 masked circles; which is not what I needed. So I used radial symmetry (also set to 3 to hide parts of the cylinder) then draw out the masks. Then I inverted the masks and extracted the barrel jacket.

From there I trim, polish and smooth as needed. I will often ReMesh the result to reduce the poly count then Project All. Then polish it very slightly, subdivide and Project All again. I may repeat that several times until the mesh is pretty dense and the polish yields a nice edge. I then step down subdividions to reduce the poly count but still maintain a good looking mesh and delete the higher subdivisions.

When I use Shadowbox I generally have the resolution set to 512; I make the masks slightly larger, or in the case of a cut out, smaller than the final piece needs to be. Then I use the clipping, polish, smooth and trim brushes to refine the shape. Sometimes you will want to create a complex piece by "laminating" several parts together and I use primatives wherever possible too to create a more complex part then remesh all into one piece.

I also like to scale my shadowbox or plane down to just what I need for a piece relative to the overall model, which can give you better detail.

[Crazy Horse]

Hey!

Thank you so much for the information! very good tips and tricks that will come in handy! thank you again for taking your time and explaining your workflow in such detail.

Peace

[DLangley]

Well, I thought it was time to add bit of color and a material to this baby. So here is the first interation of that. Let me know what you all think.

[EZRA52]

It's really looking great D. So clean. And yes, thanks for those great tips.

[Dragon]

As I keep stating, this piece is just amazing. Liking the colours.

Oh, found this video on Youtube, single shot and auto firing of this amazing weapon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW6tL...eature=related

And just ran across this 'METAL STORM':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFjGb...eature=related

And talking about cool weapons, check out this Star Wars/Star Trek type weapon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2_2c...eature=related You gotta see what it does at the end, just amazing.

Your next projects?

[DLangley]

Thanks Exra52;

Once again thanks Dragon, and thanks for the links. Pretty impressive weapons technology, perhaps the days of the venerable old M2 are numbered.

Here are some other projects I have done in ZBrush.

[RageNrock]

Nice Job man! I like the Whitetail.

[Dragon]

You really have ZBrush down. Nice job on the painting/texturing of the 'deer'.

[DLangley]

Thanks RageNrock and Dragon;

I guess I'm on a weapons kick lately; here is a WIP of a 6Lb Cannon I've started. Again all ZBrush using Z4R2. I will post updates as I go along.

[DLangley]

I've been spending time working with some of the new Z4R2 functionality to work on this cannon piece. Here is an update on my progress thus far. Using Dynamesh, Insert brushes and several other techniques I was able to build this rough model and keep the total poly count under 1.5 million.

I'm looking forward to a fix for issues discovered in Windows XPSP3 but with the flexibility of ZBrush there are plenty of alternate ways to achieve what I need.

As always C&C are welcome.