Does anyone know of a tutorial that shows how to take a complex model or shape and make a negative of the same shape? An example would be taking a key and placing it in putty thereby getting a negative shape including the engraving detail. I would like to take a face model and achieve the same effect if possible (…like a reverse relief sculpture). If anyone has any info on this please let me know.
Yeah, an easy way would be to create a plane, subdivide a few times. Let’s say you want to have a relief of a head you made, well you can move the plane to the center of the head and with plane selected and only the head as the second visible subtool in the list, hit project all, move the distance slider to 1.
If you aren’t getting the desired result, you may need to use the move tool to roughly match up the area you want relief, so just push that area of the plane until it is in the same relative area as the head.
Or you could use the match-Maker tool to push the plane into the head with transpose move tool, which will create the imprint
Or use a combination of both to get it looking right.
Also, under Display Properties in the right side tools, click Double Sided, and if needed Flip the Normals
If you then wanted to take the plane and add some depth, for instance turn it into a 3d box, you can use panel loops, or merge a box with it and dynamesh, up the resolution to keep the details of the relief.
Hope that helps, if it was too vague, let me know, I’ll make some diagrams
Cheers
Or I was just thinking, you could do a dynamesh subtract (negative), using the head as your subtract and the plane as the target.
You could also say, take a sqare screengrab of the head front on, black and white, and use that as an alpha, you’d need to adjust the light to get the result you want until happy for the alpha.
You could also use projection master, there are many ways to approach this, if I think of more I’ll reply here.