Z4 Beta Testing By: Norman Schaar

[Norman3D]

Hey all!

It has been very exciting to be part of the beta testing of Zbrush4 with such talented artists!




One of the first things I did was take the new mannequin and play around with it until I found the pose I liked. It's intuitive and great fun to use!
You can create an adaptive skin out of it, but I decided to only use it as a reference, since I already had a mesh ready that I would pose later using trans pose.




I actually started sculpting the head and attached the body later. But I had nothing to worry about, since the improvements in the projection are life saving! I used GoZ to bring the mesh from Zbrush to 3dsMax, retopologize, and back to Zbrush in order to reproject the details to the new mesh.
In previous versions of Zbrush you might have had issues with open edges "expoding" somewhat, and you might have seen yourself having to clean up after-wards. Not anymore!
There are a couple of new settings that will help you out, like "ProjectionShell" that defines the "cage" size, or the "Inner" button that will make sure that everything inside the cage is projected.
This is one of my favorite improvements since I usually like to chop, cut, slice and weld my meshes back together a lot.


On to the hair...
I actually started modeling a section of the hair in 3dsMax. I took a cylinder, twisted it and applied a symmetry modifier, resulting in a rather unclean mesh.



I then took a Cylinder without caps and brought both back to Zbrush with GoZ. I projected all the detail from the high res mesh on the new cylinder, and as a result I got a clean new mesh!
Since I now had to make the hair longer, the best and quickest way I found was to go back to the first subdivision of the cylinder and render out a displacement map.
In 3dsMax I duplicated the hair portion several times, attached them all, and brought it back to Zbrush. I subdivided the mesh and applied the displacement map I had rendered out before. All in a matter of minutes.



I had a total of 50 hair subtools, which I duplicated in 3dsMax and Zbrush.
In order to pose them carefully, I assigned a spline to every hair in 3dsmax.
After posing all the hair objects in 3dsMax I simply used GoZ to "update" the pose of the hair meshes in ZBrush.

I hope I'll be able to post more WIP images throughout the week


Once again,

Thank you all!

[chemkid]

nice character. i'm sure you could've finished without using max. ;-)


chem!

[sasquatchpoacher]

Hair looks great. How did you assign a spine to the hair strands in max?

[Beholder]

choos an object and then "pick path" (which is your spline.)

[Norman3D]

Exactly! Just add a Path Deform Binding modifier (WorldSpaceModifier), click on Pick Path, select your spline, and then optionally "Move to Path", so that your object is perfectly aligned to the spline