ZBrushCentral

Using Zbrush for Second Life Mesh!

Second Life (that crazy place) has recently updated their game with a new system called “Mesh” that allows for much more detailed models to be brought into the game. I recently finished my first attempt at a Mesh project using my weapon of choice, Zbrush, and wanted to post them here for critique and fun. I am still very much a novice, but I am learning more every day and enjoying every moment of it.

The concept was a very old sketch of mine from back in high school of an Anubis themed Exo-suit with thematic inspirations from Stargate, predator, and other fun movies and games I grew up playing. It was built and textured completely inside of Zbrush, with rigging done in Maya.

Everything in this image was made in Zbrush and brought into Second Life (With the exception of the floor to the room, which does not belong to me.) as part of a one day event involving a hidden ruin in the deserts. Statues, walls, and other props were all made in Zbrush.

I had a blast making the Anubis armor and set, and most importantly I learned a lot. It was especially fun to see it brought to life in game, running around in real time with players. A long way from that errant sketch pad from High school.

The only real big disappointment is that we could not get the under suit to rig correctly, which resulted in it being relegated to a baked texture on a much lower res body model. It still looked acceptable, but I really liked the under suit and it was a shame to see it completely flattened into a texture.

All in all, it was great fun and I can’t wait to start on the next project.

Attachments

ANUGauntlet.jpg

AnuBodysuit.jpg

ANU-8.jpg

hi dude… as one SL mesh user to another im impressed. that kind of work in sl looks amazing
i do have to ask >_> what was the upload cost? :confused:

keep it up

c4th clawtooth

Depends on if you mean in Lindon or Server weight? Both of them fluctuate pretty wildly, though Decemation Master helped an amazing amount with keeping that down without losing much if any detail. That plug-in is a godsend. I also found out today that the server weight/sim cost increases exponentially dependent on the Mesh /scaling/ inside of SL. Which really surprised me. So the upload weight can be a little deceptive!

And thank you very much for the kind words! Your rhino ring is outstandingly beautiful. How wonderful it must be to enjoy the tactile feelings of holding your 3D work in your actual hands. Very cool!

Hi Rykka. Normaly at this time of night, I like to just ‘lurk’ around and not write at all (I get off of my regular day job at 8:30 PM everynight, and it’s very energy draining), so I am usually too tired to write anything… just like to relax by looking at all the cool art my fellow ZBrush artists have posted through out the day. HOWEVER, saw your work and find it very wonderful. I like your choice of colours (that dark grey and gold… too cool). I am enjoying all the little details. I really like the Gauntlet, all the little lines etc, real neat. Never played Second Life but have read others comments on the web that it’s an awsome game. You know, as I looked more at the suite and gauntlet, I was wondering, how the heck did you get such clean ‘gold’ work in there. You see, I ask because I am getting ready to make some gold trim on a vehicle I am work on i.e. around the windows, but, when I mask, it’s all jagged and crappy looking. Any tips on how to get things looking ‘crisp’. I have seen where one can paint a colour, make a group then edge loop it, but, do you have another way you do it? Or is your mesh that ‘clean’ that you do not have problems with the ‘jaggies’? Anywho, if you can give me some insight, would be great.

And, what did you render in? Maya or ZBrush or another Render? If in ZBrush, how’d you get the ‘circles’ to glow (done in ZBrush or Photoshop?)

Again, love how you did all this work. Must have been real fun to work on something from your High School days. Best.

Hello Dragon!

Late night is the best time for lurking and posting both. I love those quiet hours when the rest of the world slows down; wonderful for getting work done. Thank you so much for the compliments, they mean a lot! I am very nervous about posting things here most of the time, so it always feels great to know when someone likes something I’ve made. (Though I love a good constructive critique too!)

Second Life is a really bizarre game, but it can certainly be awesome, if not always even a “Game”. The really amazing thing about it though is that everything in it is user generated, user created. It has open building, scripting, animating, everything… so you can really make and do just about anything you want. And it takes no time at all to put it all in motion… so, as soon as I finish a piece I just upload it and… ‘poof’… dozens if not hundreds of people are then running around playing with it in real time. It’s an amazingly fun feeling.

As for the gold: most of that I didn’t actually use a mask for. I find I run into the same issues a lot with jagged masking edges, especially when it comes to convergent materials. So most of the gold elements are actually RGB/Add/Sub painted directly on by hand with the standard brush. No alphas or stencils were used aside from a wonderful “Screw” alpha available in the downloads area. I find that painting while sculpting at the same time, and always /last/, helps make sure that the materials are well defined inside of the lines they are made for. Doesn’t work for all workflows, but it helps.

Also, I am not completely certain what you are doing in your project (though it looks really neat! Reminds me of something you would see in a Double-Fine game.) but would this help? http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161537 The first video explains how to blend materials while rendering in BPR. I don’t know if it’s what you need, but it might be able to help some! Hope it does. Shaders are still a bit over my head at the moment, it’s all very alien to me, but I hope to learn them soon.

As for rendering, none of those are actually pro-rendered at all! Both of the images (with the exception of the bodysuit picture) are actually in-game and in-world. The one with the Anubis in the hallway is actually just me wearing it in the game and snapping a screenshot with depth of field on. Same thing with the gauntlet. The glow was added inside the game using the game’s simple, built in tools and that is simply a screenshot I took when I was done. No Photoshopping at all outside of the black border I habitually put on my pictures.

And yes, working on a project from an old sketch from high school was a thrill. I have been inspired to go drag out my old sketch pad to see what other “ancient” characters I can dredge up from my youth. It was a blast.

Tonight’s project though, is a set of adventure themed items I plan on handing out as a gift to everyone in-world as a thank-you to the players for their support. This is an early backpack I made, though I’ve yet to fill it’s pockets and straps with tools and trinkets. Just baked it, need to go in and fix some of the texture issues in Photoshop. Much fun!

Backpack.jpg
Rykka~

Wow, Rykka! These look great! I especially like your backpack! I almost always enjoy seeing these “bits and pieces” posts more than a huge finished project just to see the details that sort of get thrown away in a full size render. Keep posting!

Well thank you VoodooDad! (And a great name, by the way.)

Working with SL (Second Life) is full of these pieces. It’s very hard to describe the workflow. Generally in SL you have to make everything in parts. For instance, the Anubis armor I made was composed of… oh geeze… Eighteen unique parts? For instance in the head alone there was the head, the tassel, the hair, the throat armor and the ears. All of which needed to be detailed from all sides since inside of the game they can be pulled apart. One of the biggest past times in SL is people buying things, tearing them apart to make their own unique designs out of them. So if someone took my Anubis apart I would need to make sure that even the parts the hair hid were fully detailed. It can be a bit time consuming, but you can re-purpose pieces a lot this way in many useful and unforeseen ways.

Anubis Head2.jpg

So essentially, all of these models are made up of many little detailed tiny parts which are single objects on their own!

Cool. Thanks for the reply Rykka. Freehand, wow, very steady hand there my friend. But you know, after looking at your work, and thinking about my piece, maybe I should just freehand it. After all, the final image is not to be viewed like ‘right in your face’. At a distance it should all blend in real nice (perhaps as you suggest the link to the material blend). Will experiment and see. I agree with voodoodad, that bag is way cool. Looks as one can reach through the monitor and touch it (looks just like thick worn leather). Great job there man-:+1:

More fun with mesh and Zbrush! I’ve taken to streaming my work live on occasion (really helps keep me focused knowing that there are people watching. Great for combating procrastination.) and sometimes when I do, I let people pick what I am going to make. The first time I did this, someone went- “Creeper!” while the topic was masks. So, I decided to make a creeper mask for fun and tried to come up with what I feel a creeper would look like if it was super real and scary. The results can be seen in the thumbnail below.

The image on the far left of the creeper shot is it actually inside the game. It was a blast to make.

The next attempt, last night- I wanted to make another mask… (probably going to make a set at this rate, though of course the copywrited Creeper is off limits for this) so I tried my hand at making a traditional demon. Horns, big teeth, angular features, a classic. This one I actually incorporated subtools into and also had a great deal of fun making. It imported perfectly into the game (though I forgot to take a picture) and I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Dont Fear the Creeper.jpg
DemonHeads1a.jpg

Next day’s head! Had a great deal of fun with this one. It is (emberassingly) my first real human face I’ve ever sculpted from scratch. I also made a custom alpha to use with the stitch brush for the chain that worked out surprisingly well! All in all, I am very happy with it.

Djinn Head.jpg

Okay, despite feeling increasingly silly about it- I cannot seem to get the full images to post into the thread despite having done so in previous posts far above. I can only manage to get little thumbnails now. Would anyone mind setting me on the right path with this?

Thank you in advance.

See my image attachment below (read what’s in the image-;)):

INSERT IMAGE_IMAGE.jpg

Testing…

Djinn Head.jpg

Nope, weird. It’s still coming out as a thumbnail. C’est la vie. I suppose people can just click on them if they want to see, though it doesn’t have the same feeling as just loading up the page and seeing it. Probably easier on the server though!

Thanks for the help though, Dragon! Glad to see you got your hotrod finished. It looks great!

Woo! Got the image thing to work! I wanted to do something more colorful, but I needed to round out this set of heads first and finish the lineup of concept sketches that I made. This was tonight’s project, streamed Live before people willing to watch me klutz around for several hours. Had a lot of fun making it, though I had serious issues with running out of points on the teeth, ending up with them being waaaayyyyy more simple than I wanted them to be. C’est la vie.

7066887109_8466557cb6_b.jpg

Ooh. That’s wild!

After you upload the image, the File Upload Manager window won’t close. You’ll see your attachments in its “Attachments” section. By default, each newly uploaded attachment is checked.

What you need to do is now click the “Insert Inline” button. That is what creates the code in your post so that the image appears there rather than as thumbnails.

Thank you Jerick! It reminded me of so many different things while working on it. Gears of War, Borderlands, even Kabal from Mortal Kombat. Wasn’t really sure where it was going until it was done, and I had a lot of fun with it.

Also, thank you Aurick (lots of Ricks) I will be certain to put that to use on my next post!

Great models! I really like the clean, polished feel of it. Keep going!

Woo! Head project done! Had a lot of fun making these, and all of the variants for them. Already looking forward to my next project. Zbrush is addictive.

CHeadshots_001.jpg

CHeadshots_002.jpg