Hero Guy.

[grassynoel]

Here's another Zbrush guy with a little fiddle in Max and Photoshop.

Grassy Noel

[froyd]

wow! excellent expression in that face!!
did you render in Max or in ZBrush?

greets!

[grassynoel]

Render in max.
I build my characters in Zbrush, bring 'em into MAX an respline them so I can animate a low poly cage, then export that back into Zbrush to keep modeling on that custom mesh. I build morph targets then and do the final render in Max.

Grassy.

[andreseloy]

Congratulations,your figure is very nice. Im reading about your steps and when you said" respline them so I can animate a low poly cage" could you details a little bit more to understand, i'll aprecciated.
Thanks very much

[grassynoel]

Sure. I bring the mesh inot max and rebiuld it in low poly detail using the ZBrush sculpt as a reference.

I draw slpines directly onto the Zbrush mesh and connect them into a new mesh which is lighter in polycount that I can then animate and subdivide to bring back to the original density. This way the polygons are placed exactly where I want them and not related to the original sphere that they were pulled from.

It takes a little time but I think it's worth it. I can then paint a displacement map in zbrush and use it in MAX also.

Grassy

[andreseloy]

Thanks four kindly and quickly attention.
Congratulations again for your work.

[matvara]

Nice funny character. And very well-placed expression on his face. Could you be so kind and repost him with different profiles, to get a feeling of his overall characteristics?

[grassynoel]

Here you go. He's a little different now as I spent the night building morphs in Zbrush. I'll attach a DIVX animation test soon. (once I get it under 500k)

Grassy

[matvara]

Thanks a lot grassynoel. He actually IS a funny character, and I liked his Latex headwear. It makes him very suspicious!

[grassynoel]

Here's a morph target test.

Grassy
hero1.zip

[nukage]

cool animation, i love how the eyes jump around realisticly(sp?). cant wait till I can do that in zbrush without needing another software package.

[juandel]

love that animation!

- juandel

[50'sKID]

That's a great face grassynoel! I agree with nukage. A Zbrush Animation Studio!! Dare we even dream so much? 50.

[KenH]

Looking great GrassyKnoll! Do you have Max 5? What tool do you use to draw splines onto the zbrush mesh?? Thanks.

[grassynoel]

At the moment I just draw splines onto the mesh with 3D snap set to vert and face and edge. I then attach them together and use a free plugin called hspline (made by habware) to set the same number of knots in each spline. I then use crosssection followed by surface (set to one level). Ad a little push to inflate the mesh a touch and add a meshsmooth modifier to the resulting mesh. I adjust it in or out to match the original mesh with the push modifier I added earlier.

There is also a plugin called glue from Itoo software that projects splines onto mesh.

Hope that helps.

Grassy