Sean's Sketches (Anatomical Nudity)

[Pro4210]

Hehe, looks nice Sean. Especially those last two.

[SpaceMan]

work
How did you get the fibers between the rocks

Thanks Fracture, glad you like em



More understanding of the Fibers mat/Fibers BPR system.

It took awhile of messing with all the slider combos, but I think I've got a handle on the system now.

[SpaceMan]

And how did you get the fibers on this one

More Spotlight fun on a little set piece I'm working on, going to add more details.

[Extra Dimensional]

Thanks Pro4210 and SpaceMan

SpaceMan: The way I got the fibers to appear where I wanted them, like in the cracks, was to fill the object with it's material first, then use my brush and with the fibers material selected, I paint in the cracks and where I want the grass to be, but I make sure the brush only has M selected, this way it only paints the material.

The material is the same for both images, just changed the colors and the length in the material modifiers. The material is just the basic Fibers material, with tweaks made in the materials modifiers menu in S1 tab, where you add the colors and adjust the size and gravity and such.

Oh, and for the yellow grass I added Noise in the material modifiers. This way it appears to have more variety.

[SpaceMan]

Thanks for the walk through on how you did

This one has a nice cartoon atmosphere about it - like it

More Spotlight fun on a little set piece I'm working on, going to add more details.

[U_L.]

Extra Dimensional

Thank you for the hint regarding your answer to Spacemans question.
May your inspiration GODS be with you always!

[Extra Dimensional]

Thanks U_L. Yeah I hope the Muses stick around for sure



Ok, I decided to do a Spotlight Tutorial to show how easy it is to get results using the Brute Force power of Spotlight to texture complicated stuff. Because face it, with the new flexibility of having Shadowbox to model with it's very fast and easy to make all kinds of crazy and complex parts. And then of course when you're done you're left with this intimidating model that's going in all kinds of directions, but you want to texture it right...

So, I made a really complicated tool to texture, as you can see above and will be texturing it using Spotlight and a quick method I've worked out in this post.

When I look at something like this, I think "I won't bother to texture that, it's nuts, no way in hell, I'll just leave it as is, or put a matcap on it or something because life is too short."

But now, with the way they've set us up with this new method of Spotlight texturing, it only takes a little effort to imagine what it could like textured in full color, then set to work to make it happen.

So here's a demo showing how I'm going about it.

First thing is I put it on the canvas without perspective in the view I want to texture with. No UV's nothing for this, just make sure the subtools are high enough poly count to accept a fairly sharp texture. This tool total is about 1.5 million polies and is made of 4 total Subtools. About half an hour work to make the mesh using the Shadowbox and Projection Master along with Zspheres.

Here it's on the canvas in a front view filling up most of the workspace:




This is the base image I'm going to use to look at and create textures with. I leave the tool open in Zbrush in this position and I go to work making some textures.

You can draw them by hand, you can scan them, you can use photos, or if you love plugins like me you can use plugins and photoshop to make interesting base textures using the image of your mesh.

I thought, Maybe steampunk style, maybe a bit gothic for this...it's sort of a rough idea in my head of what I want it to look like. Maybe some wood paneling, rust, some ivory, some brass and copper and some chipped paint would come together nicely.

So using that process of thought, I run some filters using Filter Forge plugin to get those effects. Highly recommend it, this process is almost brainless when you have something like Filter Forge or other powerful plugin suite. Or you can just use your own texture library or even the net to get your textures prepped and ready. This phase takes about as long as a lunch break but helps alot when it's time to start laying down the texturing. Coming already armed with a big arsenal of various textures to your project is the way to go.

So what was I saying, Ivory, brass, copper, rust, chipped paint, wood etc....so I took a few minutes and made some interesting textures using the base image, here's a comp of that:



Now that that's done it's time to go back to Zbrush and start in with Spotlight. I'll post shots of that progress as I go along today.

[Extra Dimensional]

First I created a base material for the wood, using Basic Material as the base and then adjusting the diffuse and specularity to get a feel of old, handled wood that may have been lacquered at one time but has grown dull and lost it's sheen. Then I save the material in case I need to do more like that, or if Zbrush crashes.

Next is using spotlight to put down a base texture of wood (top row middle in the texture comp) I then got a feel for how the carved wood could look.

Then I mostly used polypaint after that to get it done.

Also I sculpted as I went when I saw a form that I wanted to bring out, or a detail I wanted to carve in. Sometimes the texture starts to reveal places you can take the sculpting work. I also loaded a texture into spotlight of some worn wood, a photo texture, and placed it sparingly on some details to break up the color.

I also added details such as scratches, pock marks and dings in the wood after looking at a reference image of carved wood. To do that I dug up some grungey type alphas and used the elastic brush with a 30 or so Z setting to drag them out. I also kept RGB on and a dark brown/black color to enhance those deep pock marks and scratches.

Once the wood started shaping up I enhanced the highlighting of the edges by using Cavity Masking in the masking palette and then switching to my Trim Dynamic Trails brush with RGB set to about 15 and a light yellow red color and began running the brush over the edges of the details to sort of "Drybrush" the areas. The cavity masking protects the indentations and leaves the raised areas exposed. This is cornerstone technique for alot of the texturing I'll do.

Once everything looked ok, I dropped the canvas into Projection Master mode and used a couple brushes to sharpen up some of the details and add some deep shading to areas that would have built up grime and gunk. The Contrast brush is great to sharpen up edges, but it's very strong so you have to take it down to a very low RGB setting and use the Drag Rect stroke. Again, this is to enhance and sharpen up edges and make some details pop. The other brush I like to use is the Shading Enhancer brush and the Highlighter, those are both self explanatory.

Once done, I picked up the Projection Master and that's what you see here. Now to the next part of the model.




Okay, the next part was really a quickie. It was just a sort of frame made from zspheres.

I made the Mat from the Metal material, just tweaked the specularity a bit to make it more punchy, since this is a thin part I wanted some more shine, and filled it with a mid value grey color.

Here's a shot showing how I applied the texture:



I just found an interesting part of the texture, the bandy part, then rotated Spotlight around with symmetry active and applied that part of the texture over and over to the frame. Took like one minute.

I then took the Clay Buildup brush and went over the bands a couple times, with Bacface masking turned on. This raised them up a bit from the metal frame and gave it some depth. Again, took longer to type about it than to actually do it.



Then I went to it with the Trim Dynamic Trails + Cavity Masking combo and then to Projection Master where I used the Saturation Brush in combo with the Hue Shifter Brush and Highlighter Brush to add more color tones and punch up some of the hues and make the metal bits more shiney.

Last I maneuvered parts of the mesh around the wood part to give it a bit of interplay, which you can see working together here:



Now on to the next bit.

[tuff]

very nice form and shape indeed

[Extra Dimensional]

Thank you Tuff

Ok last image for awhile, going to eat, but finished the other frame:



This subtool may not stay in the final piece, not liking it that much.

Went for a bone, ivory and leather type of affair. The ivory was done by simply using the white-out texture from the comp, and selecting Basic Material 2 and painting over it with spotlight. Then I selected Basic Material 1, which is more diffuse, then painted over the highlights after cavity masking. Came out looking like bleached bone ivory mix, which is alright, but the tool itself is very meh and detracts from the piece more than it adds I think.

But anyway, now for the last big ztool after some food, almost done actually.

[Extra Dimensional]

Decided to finish it tonight before I crashed. Changed around the subtool I didn't like and rendered out a couple up close and personal shots to show the texture pretty clearly, and this concludes the demo of how I work with Spotlight to quickly texture very complex meshes.

[Extra Dimensional]

I want to try my hand at using Spotlight to texture a character now, after all this ....non character stuff. But first, I need a character!

So I spent today working on one, this is where I'm at so far. No pants yet because I'm still deciding on a skirt or "breeches" for the look. I'm leaning towards knee length breeches so that I can model some boots and have the boots at least be visible. More to come, just the genesis really, although it took much of the day.

I messed around alot though experimenting with random stuff but didn't get any good results worth showing, although I'm close to coming up with a good way to do chainmail pieces using mesh insert. Still haven't got it sorted yet though.

[Extra Dimensional]

Not too much progress but I didn't have alot of time to focus today. The boot took most of the time I had to model. I began sculpting it from an extraction, but ended up just doing a basemesh for the boot in max based on her foot/lower leg. Gave me a cleaner mesh to start with.

Changed around the shirt, gave her breeches, some bows etc...some work on the hair and whatnot. Probably ready to start subdividing and sculpting tomorrow.

[Extra Dimensional]

Some WIP shots of work on her tunic/leather armor/bandolier bags. The bandolier strap is just a placeholder to help with scaling the bags.

[Extra Dimensional]

Some work on accessories. A coiled rope, which I may do a small tutorial on as maybe some people might like to see how it was done. A small rope pulley thing, for rappelling, grappling or other fun stuff and the beginnings of a wheellock pistol, which is turning out really fun to model. I also modeled a complete set of some thieves tools, but I need to redo the modeling to bring them up a bit to match some of the other stuff here, they'll be useful to use as reference for the next attempt at modeling them at least.