ZBrushCentral

AH Intro and sculpts

Hello everybody. I’m an audio guy but I started getting into 3d graphics about a year ago. I have been browsing these forums for a while now. I learned a lot from this community and I hope I can share as well.

Attachments

CombineConcept.jpg

lighcapfinal.jpg

composite6.jpg

comp7+8.jpg

Composite1.jpg

Shadowbox^^^

//youtu.be/BpdW_SLm1-8


I had to lower the quality of compression a bit to get the file size down. :frowning:

This is the high poly in Zbrush for the render above.


Nice Glock and Soldier. I like the details ya got in the gun. I feel from when i last held one that around where the thumb goes the bulge under it needs to be sharpened. Good stuff dude.

Thanks for being my first reply Viking! I really could have done better on it in some areas looking back. I missed out on the indent where the slide locks after the last round is fired. I also should have made the button to release the slide as part of the actual handle and frame subtool or object. I am finding more and more in modeling that the key is doing something wrong then doing it wrong a few more times before getting it right. Ultimately, I want to make this a low poly model but I’m trying to figure out the most efficient method.

Here’s some build-up of how I made it.

glockcomp.jpg
I tried to keep the mesh as low poly count as possible in Maya and then sent everything to Zbrush as individual objects.
Glock progress.jpg
Then I polypainted it to figure out where the details were.
Glock progress2.jpg
Now I want to extract the maps and send the model back as low poly to Maya like I did with the collumn above. I’m trying to figure out how to make this thing one object though and I’m stuck. I still want to maintain control in Maya for selection of individual parts of the gun for animation. From what I understand, the more materials and objects will affect game engines framerate way more than polycount which will make my model useless if it has too many individual parts (objects) and/or materials.

Thanks again for the reply and I will still be working more on the model. I tried merge maps and subtools options in multimap exporter but I haven’t figured out what I’m doing wrong yet.

Hey there good stuff, ya are on the right track. I dont know if ya have seen my thread here of norse hilts, but i am putting them in the SKyrim game engine and UDK ( Unreal development kit ) And they can be seperate objects but they need to share the same unwrap. I dont know how to use the UVW editor in maya but in max you just import both objects and then you just put a edit poly modifyer and then a unwrap UVW on them and it is one unwrap. Game pieces arent ever usually one solid object they are severial messy objects with a very nice texture on them. And as far as the maps all i do is clone the texture map over and export em out, and the same with the Normal and Diffuse. Although sometimes i do use X Normal or crazybump for the normals they give me a better result sometimes. WHat game engine are ya thinking of? I also use MODO 601 as my main modeler if ya have questions.

Here is a Zbrush question for you veterans out there:

Take a look at the back of the slide geometry. It used to be a perfect plane but you can see that the normal has distorted the grip where you pull back the slide and the vertexes near the back are not lined up.

The problem is that when I subdivide in zbrush and I mess with the high poly mesh, my lower subdivisions are also effected. So when I go to extract the normal map, the original low poly has been distorted.
It used to be a perfectly flat plane on the back of the slide on both sides. There is now an indent where Zbrush has averaged the displacement of the high poly.

I’m sure someone has asked this before but I have searched and I can’t figure that out.
Is there some way to lock the base mesh so that the changes to the high poly do not affect the lower resolution mesh?

try morph-targets :wink:

Problem solved (sorta)

Morph targets is correct, but I did that and it wasn’t working. So after some testing, I have found the culprit to be that the Plugin “Multimap Exporter” doesn’t work with the morph targets.
I wonder if this is something I could help out with. Is there a source code for the plugins?

I’ve got the solution for you. Before you try this, remember to NOT save during this process. It’s easier to just reload the latest version of the ZProject/ZTool than doing all the resetting steps necessary.

1.Go to your lowest subdivision

  1. Import the original model.
    For this to work, the model needs to have the same vertex order and count as subdiv 1. Zbrush will tell you if that is not the case and suggest a projection.
    Do NOT go up in subdivisions after doing this. A lot of people don’t know this, but when changing a subdivision of the model the higher subdivisions does not change until you step up in subdivisions. It is also important to note that the original model must have the same general shape as the subdiv 1. If you for example have scaled up the gun or made the barrel longer in ZBrush this wont’t work.

  2. Create your displacement or normal map
    You can do this using the usual process using tool/displacement map/create dispMap or multi map exporter. Multi map exporter does not mess up displacement as you described above.
    It is although possible to create uncorrect maps by saving a wierd morph target by mistake in combination with the switch MT button in the multi map exporter menu

  3. Reload you original file and do NOT save in order to reset the model.

Thanks for the support Morris and Stone! You are too kind for helping me with this. I’m probably going to redo the model from the basemesh anyways since I kind of rushed it and missed some details. I even threw in some triangles out of pure laziness that I want to fix. I am familiar with the projection tools since I used it along with remesh all as a cheap and easy retopo on the collumn so I see what you are talking about.

Thanks again for your time.

I have redone my glock model (This time I got the whole thing onto one UV map in Maya and I took the time to make a morph target when I first imported it). One major difference is that this was all done with one subtool and polygroups. I used the method of Ctrl+Shift+Clicking on a part I wanted to group and then pressing Ctrl+Shift+X to grow the selections. Then I just hit Make Polygroup when I was happy with the selections. This one is more correct and may even go up for grabs on turbosquid as my first model for purchase.

The gun itself (with all parts including bullet in the chamber) is just 902 faces or 1772 triangles. There were 4 triangles altogether that are on parts of the mesh where the tradeoff of fixing them would have cost so many polys it would not have been worth while.

The texture and normal are 2048x2048. This model would probably be great for a game.

composite3resize.jpg

I made this sculpt a while back and thought I would share. I stole the smoke from google images and to give credit http://ajbarickman.com/images/smoke-2.jpg