Volcano X

[Arran J Lewis]

This is a project that was given to me at the begining of the week, with a deadline for 9.30 this morning. It was part of the project 'x' briefing at university, where each student is given a brief in accordance with their areas of interest, but not so related to their ongoing work, mine being the Human Anatomy. I was actually quite excited as I really like cut through illustrations, and so figured there is a mighty software I know of that can help me get this done in time. So, (x+Z)xme= volcano. oh i am a little sleepy now and need some shut eye. Hope you find this interesting.
I will post some stages and info on this on Saturday. :-)

[Frenchy Pilou]

...indeed !
Original birthday cake

[wet_chicken_lip]

Thats pretty impressive, very original, a fantastic use of zbrush.
looking foward to seeing the different stages and info

[anibalin]

Thats pretty impressive, very original, a fantastic use of zbrush.
looking foward to seeing the different stages and info

quote that. cannt wait to check those stages. very cool dude.

[lemonnado]

All wrong!
All Volcanoes are made out of baking soda.
Massive, giant piles of baking soda!
Lemo

[SolidSnakexxx]

Wow this is brilliant!

[Intervain]

awesome use of Zbrush! Love it

[agv1]

I love this. It reminds me of the classic illustrations found in the Knowledge through COLOR series by Bantam Books. Also reminds me of the miniature displays you might see in a museum of natural history. Great modeling and render!

[Arran J Lewis]

Thanks loads for your comments, although now i can't look at the image without wondering if i could actually make a cake that looks like that :-), hmm, need to go food shopping. The image was excepted well by the Tutor who set the brief.

1)I started with a cube3d, played with the initialize settings to make the bas shape. Whilst in edit mode i selected the top plane using ctrl/shift and then divided a few times to get plenty of resolution to work with.
2) using a variety of alphas, standard and move, i got a rough idea of some shape and decided to draw the image on the canvas with some perspective selected (from the draw pallet). I thought at this stage it was looking rather like an ant hill.
3)I played around with the shape some more and added some other lumps on the plane to start working out where i might like some rocks and hills.
4) Using the distortion pallet i added some noise, with a little extra noise to the side of the volcano and then inflated it a little. This gave me the beginning of the land slide section.
5)Using the hook brush i pulled up some of the plane to get an idea of some trees and bushes, also adding the lava flow area, by masking and smoothing.
6)I hid most of the sculpt and played with the main shape of the volcano, trying to give it better structure and get away from the ant hill look. This was done just my using 'move' and pulling it about.

Finally I added 6 to a previously saved 5, plus an original base block to produce the final sculpt. The base block was needed again as I deleted it along the way to free up some processor (with not enough power, it really feels like i am trying to cut the lawn with a spoon sometimes :-)


here are a couple of angles to show where this is going:


I then added a grey texture to the model and a material that had low specularity, set the light to the top left and dropped it on the canvas. I added trees which were made from a combination of distorted Spheres with noise and inflate added, and also used the fibre brush. I added lots of small rocks by distorting a sphere, and then used spray stroke to apply them, changing the size as I went along:


I painted some colours on using imported textures and sprayed them on. Made a lava material and then added colour and texture to the lava area. I then exported to PS to play with the colours further and put the lava in place:


I got some rock textures and within PS put them together in strips to make a texture ready to import into ZB. I used a 3d plane and then divided it, made an mask using the texture and inflated from within the deformation pallet. This gave me the cut through rocks and stone. Then within PS I created a new layer which I added the cut through rock, some further cut through ash for the volcano and also some lava which was was painted in PS and then taken into ZB on a 3dplane to give it some form:


Finally I added the lava bombs, eruption, sky and clouds in PS. Also making a few small changes using the rubber stamp tool to add some more rocks here and there.

[John Strieder]

Wooooow, what a beautiful piece!!! I love it!

[Tina Albert]

Cool Buddy and it was very nice of you to illustrate it out to us !

[agv1]

Wow, these are great making-of shots! It's almost like watching someone build the miniature terrain of a model railroad. Cool work-flow for hot lava-flow (sorry)!

[lemonnado]

Awesome!
Lemo

[coye]

There are some really cool ideas in your step by step that I never would have thought of.

Thanks for sharing... Oh, and cool image

[Dondemaker]

Arran, a great illustration, and thanks for showing us the step by step.