ZBrushCentral

An Old Withering Tree

Hey guys, hope everybody is well! I started working on my second Zbrush sculpt and safe to say I am addicted. This is a piece I started the other day with the intention of taking it all the way to full render and illustration, and hopefully posting WIP images and getting your criticism will motivate me to update regularly and see it through to the end. This is the very initial adaptive skin after the zsphere base, with no work done yet except a little surface noise for the render. Hope you all like it so far, and any comments or criticisms no matter how harsh are much appreciated :slight_smile:

All the best
-Robert

It’s looking very good so far :+1:
With a couple of more subdivisions, branches also pointing backward and forward(maybe that’s not your intention), and a nice paint over with an environment this would become be a really great piece! :slight_smile:

@Santis thanks very much man :slight_smile: glad you’re liking it. That’s the plan so far, I’ve been mocking up a spooky paint environment to put this thing into.

I’m having some poly issues though, because of the amount of zspheres I used to make this thing, it’s running at like 500,000 poly’s on subd 1. I’ll only be able to subdivide it twice more before my computer blows up. Is there a really easy way to retopoligize this, especially all those tiny branches? Or should I split the branches into separate subtools? :confused:

If I were you I would try a local subdivision on the thickest parts. (mask the branches and subdivide)

That definitely helped out, thanks :slight_smile: I was able to redistribute the polys a lot better and more evenly throughout the mesh. It’s at about 3million right now and I can’t reconstruct subdivs because there are some tris somewhere I guess, but oh well. Stage one of sculpting! Any crits?

An update on starting the detailing process, also updated the original post with my concept. Severely lowered the blobbing of all the branches and added a little twisting. Started working on adding the bark too, which I’m not sure if I like yet or if it should be a little more stylized to fit with the structure. Any crits would be really helpful :slight_smile: thanks guys.

Moving in the right direction!:+1:

Thanks again! I’ve run into a problem though it seems. I knew having so many poly’s in the first few subd levels was going to come back and bite me in the ass :p. It’s too dense so Zbrush runs out of virtual memory everytime I try to use UVmaster or when I try to generate a displacement map. I can’t reconstruct subdiv because apparently the zspheres generate a few tris that I didn’t know about. Any advice on what I can do to fix it? Retopology for all those little branches seems like it would take twice as long as the whole project combined!

Looks good so far. I like the overall stylized design.

As for the problem you’re having, you could use your Zsphere base mesh, append it as a subtool, divide it up a few times and project it onto the detailed model. That would fix the no reconstruction problem. But if you run out of memory again, well… Only more RAM will help you there. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m just hoping you have a backup at the Zsphere stage… :expressionless:

Also, you could use some external modelling app to remove some edge loops from the tiny branches.
That might considerably reduce your base polycount. :slight_smile:

does that work? masking an area then subdividing ? wouldnt you have issues at the boarder?

@tchaikovsky2 Thank you! I’m gonna try your suggestions, the only problem is my original zsphere base comes out to 500,000 polys :x so I can only divide it once, which doesn’t give me enough to project the finer details for the hi-res mesh. Your warm robot scene is really amazing by the way, went straight into the inspiration folder. Fantastic work :+1:

@tyrellcorp yep it works, pretty well too. you can see a small border, but as long as the poly difference isn’t huge, a little smoothing works just fine.

Hey guys, got a little discouraged trying to learn the program a little better and figure out all of these technical issues, so only a small update from me. I’m determined to finish it and hopefully make it good though, as it’ll be my first ever illustration :). I think I’m finished with most of the tree detailing, so I’m just messing around with prop ideas and boxing them out at this point, nothing big yet. Any crits or opinions would be much much appreciated!

Some more work on the terrain. Excuse the terrible shadows haha

I like where this is going. looks like it could be something out of a tim burton movie :slight_smile:

@hendrik F Hey thanks man :slight_smile: Tim Burton is the reason I got into art back when I was a little kid, so that’s a huge compliment! I always look look back to your sketchbook to get some inspiration on getting really clean lines and creative designs too by the way, great stuff!

Hopefully I’ll have a bigger update tomorrow, I’ve been pushing myself to see it through to the end and not scrap it and start something new.

hehe, thanks man :slight_smile:

I would like to see your tree in a nice render. maybe you could play a little with the BPR and add some AO, depth and some nice lighting. I do that sometimes to give my motivation a little kick, when no end is in sight, just to see how it may look once it’s done.

Does anybody have any tips on how to go about texturing it? I plan on rendering in Zbrush and can’t find any matcaps suitable to start painting on that don’t totally hide the details of the tree, and when I tried texturing it with images it just turned out horribly :expressionless:

The zsphere base I made to start sculpting from. Ohhh the hours I put into this thing, haha… :o zsphere.jpg

Very cool tree!!!

I have run into this problem in trying to create something grand with lots of geometry only to find that my machine cannot handle the subdivisions. I have settled for trees with less branches and try to focus on style. One thing that I’d be willing to try in this scenario is once you are comfortable with the details you can get at this subdivision maybe try HD sub-d to push it further. I know that you can render HD now, so you might get lucky. Don’t forget to back up your model before you try though.

Another thing that I have learned is that if you create multiple subtools you can explore more details and sub-d’s per subtool. So, if you create the center section of the tree as the main tool and all of the branch sections as separate subtools you can get better results. If you are going for the illustrative approach then that might the way to go.

Using Clay Tubes or Clay Build up brushes with long strokes in the volume section of the tree and to create wrinkles for the separation of the branches makes a cool effect. After you can use the Slash1 brush to add depth between the Clay strokes. To texture I would Mask Cavity and paint various lighter browns, grays and reds and then invert mask to paint crevices with darker browns and maybe some greens.

Just an idea.

@remvc8 thanks for your suggestion :slight_smile: I checked out your tree-face sculpts and they looked really cool man. I took your advice and started messing around with the cavity masking settings a little to get some moss-like painting going. Just a test so far but let me know what you guys think! I think it’s looking okay, not great though. And I can’t seem to get a proper fitting material for the tree

TreePaintTest.jpg

Also, anybody know of any really good Zbrush 4 lighting tutorials? I feel like all my renders are starting to look the same with the same light position and render settings :x

edit: sorry for taking up a second spot on the bottom row, I forgot the other image was still there :o