Z4 Beta Testing By: Cameron Farn

[threetails]

Transparency examples.

[Doggy 7]

wow! I got it working! Thank you so much for that incredibly detailed explanation, that was much more than you had to do. I really appreciate it.

[Scrybe]

Love these crazy alien designs! Great coloring.

[KPtoons]

amazing stuff. Thank you so much for sharing. Still waiting on my license to appear in the emails haha cant wait!

[Grot]

These creatures are awesome! The walk through was great and much appreciated.

If you have a chance could you explain how to remesh and reproject things, I have a feeling this is an important part of the process to getting a great sculpt and at the moment I am clueless

once again, awesome work!

cheers

[threetails]

Doggy 7, not a problem, glad your getting a handle on it.
Scrybe, thanks very much.
KPtoons, it will be glorious.
Grot, not a problem.

The re-meshing function is a wonderful way to move your sculpts forward. You can remesh and project any number of visible subtools you wish. For a test you might want to start with only the dog tool. Go to the Remesh All button. You will see a Res slider, a Polish slider and PolyGrp button. On the ReMesh All button there are indicators for X Y Z, when these are active and you press the remesh all button the skin that is created from the visible subtools will be symetrical across one or all of those axis, for this test deactivate them all. The Res slider does pretty much what you think, it sets a value for the polygon resolution, to start with set the value to 128 (you should consider this as the lowest subdivision level of your new mesh.) The Polish slider allows you to set a value or the amount of polish which will be applied to the generated skin, it also has a small circle beside it which controls the type of polish being applied. The open circle will maintain form and volume while the closed circle will not. For now keep the circle open and set the value to 10.
The PolyGrp button, when active generates polygroups based on the intersection of subtools. This is a great feature because it allows you later to control the visibility of many parts, as well as allowing you to use the Group Loops function in the Geometry pallete to add extra loops of polygons around the polygroups to develope details or maintain edges. For your first test make it active. With all that done press ReMesh All. A skin will be generated and added to the subtool pallete with "Skin_" added to the name. Make this the active subtool, but keep the origianl visible.

Before projecting the new mesh over the old one divide it once. This will ensure you have enough detail to start with. If your base mesh has lots of detail I would suggest you project, then divide, and project again, repeat untill you have all the detail you want captured.

The start values in the Project All section of the subtool pallete are great to start with and will work with most meshes. So don't change them for this test. Hover over them with your cursor and press ctrl to get a better idea of what they do. The new ProjectionShell slider, Farthest, Outer and Inner buttons now allow you greater control over the whole projection process, so I will concentrate on those. The ProjectionShell slider sets the target mesh start point. The X Y Z tells the projection which axis to concider when projecting for now leave them all active. As an example, if you move the slider to a postive value you will notice that the target mesh (new skin_) will inflate over your source mesh (original mesh), making the Inner button active. If you move the slider to a negative value the Outer button becomes active. this is because you are telling Zbrush to start projecting from the outside in, or the inside out. A sculpture with many undercuts might benifit from a negitive start point. Think of it as "Vacume Forming" over somthing, or "Casting" into somthing. But in either case you want to move your target mesh all the way in or all the way outside your source mesh. Any area left exposed will be exculded from the projection. As Farthest suggests, when it is active it will project to the farthest points of the source mesh and can be used when either Outer or Inner is Active. Try a few tests with it on and off.

Tip: don't over inflate or over deflate the shell, move just enough to get the target mesh on the otherside of the source mesh.

All that being said, make sure your new skin is active, and that your source subtool or tools are visible, move the ProjectionShell slider in the positive direction until it covers your source mesh and let it go. It will snap back to its original form and the start distance will be established. Press the ProjectAll button and watch the fun. If you did not capture all the details you wanted, it may be because you have to few polygons, you can divide the target mesh again and re-project or you can generate a new mesh from your original with a higher Res value to capture a tighter form, but remember a higher Res means your lowest subdivision level will have a higher polycount.
Try a few tests with the dog tool provided until your comfortable with the process then let loose. Have fun.

[Grot]

Many thanks for the info on remeshing etc. I tried it out earlier today and I think I've managed to get my head around it. Sure this will help me a lot with my models.

Here's a question: I'm a big fan of zsketch but is it better to use shadowbox to create my initial shapes now?

I guess I'll just experiment, but I was wondering if there was any particular advantage to either technique?

Thanks again man, feels like I'm making progress at last

[threetails]

Grot, your welcome. I hope it helps you out. As to your other question, Ive been using them both for organic shapes, but the shadow box is really geared towards hard surface workflows. It all depends on what your trying to make and how fast you want to get there, both work great.

[womball]

How did you approach making the material and lighting for the SSS shader your using?

Did you ever finish the second character, love the design. The first is great too.

[threetails]

Womball, Ive posted the materials and the lighting at the bottom of the main page. Please have a look at the light settings and the quad skin shader. I based it on the skin material available with Z4 and tweeked it a little.

I was looking for depth, different levels of specularity and somthing that played well with the lights. You could also start with the material setup of the demo soldier. You can save out that material and use it on any other model it really is a great setup and works with lots of different light configurations. Be adventurous and change up all the colors, do alot of quick BPR renders and compare it to reference. One thing that helped me was to take some time and go over each of the sliders using the Ctrl button and seeing what everything acctually did. It took several tests to tweek everything to were i was happy, but it really is about matching whats in your head and learning what setting reflect which aspects of your refference.

I used alot of Spotlight textures and Polypaint on my model and the material really enhanced them be-utifully. I hope this helps.

[AYMEW]

Really impressive work! , and thanks for the detailed explanations- much appreciated.

[threetails]

AYMEW, your welcome, thanks for stoping in, if you need any other info, ask away.

[arthurduque]

oh! Great creatures!! and gret skin and textures!!
cool!!!

[vedanta]

Totality love your textures and finished comps in PS.
Will have to return again and again to gather all the information that you have given us. The Transpose info is especially interesting... Thanks

[threetails]

arthurduque, thanks glad you like them.
vedanta, your welcome, I really like the Caliper action of the transpose action line it really helps to keep the proportions clean, or in my case lets me see where I can break the rules.