First attempts

[voodoodad]

Stepping away from the tank for the moment after a new idea popped into my head. I was thinking about Corey's earlier comment about a personal spacecraft. Well this isn't a personal one-man craft, but it's something I always had a yen to do since the original release of Star Wars. When I was a kid I read all the various fanzines I could get my hands on concerning how the special effects were achieved and I always wanted to build a huge star destroyer type of ship the way they did back then, by scrounging a million different model parts and sticking them together until they came up with something cool looking, I never had the time/resources/workspace to do it of course, but I have Zbrush now so I can do it the modern way!

Concepting of shapes right now.

[Gary Komar]

cool works - shadow box ?

[voodoodad]

cool works - shadow box ?

Thanks Gary! (That's my first name too, btw )
Yeah, I started each of these in shadowbox, just doodling shapes with the mask tools until a certain angle catches my eye, and then I try to see where I can go with it from there. I've fallen in love with pushing the limits in shadowbox as far as they can go with various shapes and angles. Once I feel I've reached that limit, I take it to a high-density dynamesh to finish blocking out the major structures. After that I just drop dynamesh, subdivide a couple of times and start throwing bits and pieces at the model to see what sticks. Feels really fun and creative like no other program I've used before.

Speaking of bits and pieces, here's whats stuck so far;

[voodoodad]

Added details to engine and rear of ship;

[Dragon]

... but it's something I always had a yen to do since the original release of Star Wars. When I was a kid I read all the various fanzines I could get my hands on concerning how the special effects were achieved and I always wanted to build a huge star destroyer type of ship the way they did back then, by scrounging a million different model parts and sticking them together until they came up with something cool looking, I never had the time/resources/workspace to do it of course, but I have Zbrush now so I can do it the modern way!

Concepting of shapes right now.

Hi Gary, sorry I have been off the board for a bit, been having memory issues with my car (had to resort to decimating what I could to bring the file size down-after saving my HUGE file, it just became corrupted- and, bought a 16GB USB drive and made it the virtural memory area as my machine is maxed at 4GB physical memory). Anywho, the MECH, beautiful. The tank, way cool. And this space ship, it's really coming out clean. I have learned so much from this project. One of the important lessons I have learned is to Retopo everything as I create it. This I know will drasticaly help keep my file size down. I can't wait until Pixologic and Verold finish 'QRemesher'. Sounds like Pixologics solution to Auto Retopology (maybe a hybird of Retopoloy and Dynamesh-without losing details... I hope). This tool alone is going to save knuckle head artists like me that just want to create without having to think about if our projects are going to choke ZBrush or the computer.

And you know, with your qoute above, I too remember those days. I would go over to my best friends house and we would mess around trying to build a space ship or two from left over parts of plastic model car kits. Man, I miss those days.

But, I agree, with ZBrush today, one can create anything. Now, wouldn't it be cool if 3D printing cost as much as regular paper printing?


Best.

[Dragon]

Added details to engine and rear of ship;

Ooooo, I can already see those engines glowing a cool light blue.

[voodoodad]

Thanks, Dragon. Those were the days, weren't they? Hours and hours spent in the basement of my best friend, playing the original version of D&D back when it was just a small box with three plain paperback pamphlet sized books, throwing together model parts of car engines and jet fighters and thinking they looked cool... man, being an adult really sucks!

And doing a retopo is something else I need to learn. I've also decimated what I could (engine cones and the back details) but I'm still pushing 18m polys. I've stretched other models to 35m at some points without a crash, but I don't want to push too hard and lose everything. I would think a retopo on this ship would be fairly easy with mostly sharp angles and not much rounding off, so that will be my next step, probably before I add much more detail.

[voodoodad]

I'm really wishing there was a "greeble" type plugin or script for Zbrush. I've searched here and google, but all I've found are older posts that apply to long dead versions of Zbrush that don't seem to work now. If anyone knows of an easy way of adding random mechanical looking detail quickly please let me know.

[voodoodad]

I may have solved the detailing problem; I found some decent blocky alphas, lay them out, invert and inflate value of 5. Then clear the mask and overlay a more detailed alpha and inflate it by a value of 2. Doesn't look that great up close, but pulled back it looks okay.

[voodoodad]

The most fun I've had with Zbrush so far! It's amazing how you can use one very basic alpha, torture it by flipping, rotating and hanging it upside down by its ankles till it screams, and coming up with so many different looks! Love it! YOU! There in the second row! You're not loving it! LOVE IT, DAMN YOU!!!

[coreyschroeder]

You have made my day with this sculpture..
But you knew that all ready..
Corey

[voodoodad]

Thanks for the love, Corey! I thought only my day was made lol.

Finished with the smaller details. Now to add one big gun and a bunch of small turret guns. Then start searching desperately for info on using lightcaps...

[coreyschroeder]

This looks so bad@$$!

I love the hangers for the smaller fighters.
How did you create the forcefield effect, using transparency in zbrush, or is this photoshop?

Keep it up, brutha!

[voodoodad]

Thanks again Corey! The forcefields were done in zbrush. Just transparency and a very vivid color applied to the rectangles I extracted before cutting the holes for the hangers. If and when I do some post in photoshop they'll have a glow effect around them.

[voodoodad]

They got guns,
We got guns,
All God's chillun got guns!