ZBrushCentral

A little challenge...

ZBrush Artworks
#41

OK, it has been awhile. Due to having to revue many files because a corruption happened with Zbrush when grabbing it from archive - after a HD had issues, I took an hour and played with an old zsphere character. Was fun, I love posing them to see how well they may animate later on.

Some of my threads really need to see some updating. Thanks to people who have posted, especially under the toon stuff, glad you liked the shaders. Sorry to not respond, I was not paying attention to an older email server.

Jason

char.jpg

#42

OK, getting somewhere useable for Zsphere characters. The head really is the only area I’m still concerned with. I’m working on what will be, I hope the final solution. However this has gotten things very close, I was able to very quickly generate several characters from this setup that animate well with bones and/or morphs (or whatever your app calls them).

The problem area, why the nose of course! As I don’t want to use Cage in Zbrush as it constantly alters the structure that we have rigged. Of course ways exist around this, but what’s the point if you don’t push far enough to fall over the edge. :wink:

Soon as this is solved, back to the dragon in another post, that OK with you Aminuts??!! :lol:

Picture 22.jpg

#43

Very nice man! I like the style you used for the last one, the head. Looks simple, clean and well proportioned. If thats the style you want to achive, leave it like that, but if you want you can add some texture to it and redefine some muscles and bones. Good work!:+1:

#44

Very nice man! I like the style you used for the last one, the head. Looks simple, clean and well proportioned. If thats the style you want to achive, leave it like that, but if you want you can add some texture to it and redefine some muscles and bones. Good work! :+1:

#45

Thank you javierloredo, and welcome.

I’ve been experimenting for quite some time on useful production approaches with Zbrush. Some of the guys started a specific forum for this over on Highend3d.com.

I love the Zsphere poseability for the art department as well as getting poses for morphs to help the animation out where necessary. This technique speeds things up something amazing.

However, I have had such an issue getting Zsphere’s to keep certain information and put it back as expectedd when exporting the displacement map. Aurick, Edwin and myself spent alot of hours working through possibilities.

I think I got it licked, we’ll see in a bit.

Here is a quick update with the majot change and a completely new model just to prove it’s not a fluke. More for me than others. :wink:

[attach=19901]Picture 24.jpg[/attach]

Attachments

Picture 24.jpg

#46

well Jason, I’d prefer ya dropped everything and got to work on the dragon right now! But I can wait if I haaaaavvveee to.:rolleyes:

Here’s hoping all your experimenting goes well and produces the results you are looking for!!:smiley:

#47

Ok this seems to work fine. I hope it is of some value to others. Now to run it through the pipeline and see where it can be broken. :wink:

Picture 26.jpg

#48

Hello Aminuts! Been awhile, and yes we all want me to work on the dragon, you, Suzanna, Robert, Nat, George, Voja, oh the list is long. :wink:

Trust me so do I, but other characters exist in the feature, and believe it or not, the dragon has the least issues to be concerned with. :lol:

#49

Nice head Jason !
At the start of this thread you were trying to make a zsphere human head with a posable zshere mouth - the sphere layout you have now looks pretty standard- or am I missing something?
What is the problem you have solved ?
3df

#50

Hello 3dfan, I’m still working on the poseable zsphere mouth. This is a solution for an issue we ran into when exporting lowres zfigures and adding hires displacements to them. This is similar to the way others do it, but a fudamental difference is where those nouth and nose zspheres are placed. Still have to solve the other poseable issue, but got sidetracked by this issue. . :wink:

#51

Sorry Jason - the fundamental difference is…? And the effect it has is…?
You gotta spell it out for us amateurs.
3df

#52

Sorry , not much on spelling.

You’ll have to give the process a try. Basically you lose a lot of your detail unless you have the encessary base geometry available. We’ve been working through finding a good zsphere setup that allows for animation without being too heavy, while retaining or supporting the necessary data. We have had success with the cage feature in zbrush (thanks Aurick and Edwin), but everytime it is used a different base shape is created to reflect your changes, not good. The above image shows a way we found works (allowing us to standardize a base figure/armature), the earlier version above it doesn’t have the extra nose placed the way we have it in the later image and thus gets lost with the displacement export, especially if we are doing funky things like morphing from one character to another.

This should also lead to the other and original approach I was chasing.

I hope to have some time to do several tuts, but I’m now waiting for the next Zbrush full release to make sure they are relevant. Lots of images exist, I just need to do the text. Hahaha…

#53

Hello Jason,
Did you break it yet? :slight_smile:
Nice work, I admire this quest your on and I’m taking notes on your low-rez head layout.
Glad you revived this thread with your updates, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed checking everything out.
Thanks for sharing all of this smart info, it’s really helpful.

#54

So if we keep putting a sphere for each eye ,ear, nose and mouth we should be ok?

#55

Herdsmann,
I think Jason is saying its more complicated than that - right Jason?
We’ll just have to wait for the tutorial to be enlightened.
3df

#56

Herdmann, 3Dfan, it is, try it! If you don’t care about what you are going to do with it, no rules apply. However since I evaluate everything as it is useful in a pipeline I’m very specific in what things must do. Earlier posts by me have such things done, that I tried in early ignorance, without getting satisfactory results.

Joe_seig, thank you, posts like this might just get me to tear a day or two out of my schedule and get things organised for some serious updates for people to muse over.

I’m glad some find this thread and others valuable, and I will put serious effort into getting updates posted in a timely fashion.

Where were all of you during the the world’s second largest animation festival - Ottawa International Animation Festival (hosted by AWN)? Better see you next year. :wink:

#57

Wow.

I had been noodling around with trying to do what you’re doing with zspheres on and off for the last couple of weeks. I had gotten good results with magnet spheres. I think they’re really interesting when you push them into the parent sphere. Although I had trouble getting consistent results pushing and pulling zspheres that had children spheres.

Still though, you’re so far ahead of where I had gotten. I can’t wait to look at some of the ztools that you have uploaded. Thank you very much for sharing those.

I like your solution for separating the nose polygons from the eye polygons. It’s much better than anything that I had figured out.

:+1:

#58

Hello billrobertson42, glad it has been useful. I see you like Dragons as well! :wink:

I appreciate the feedback and will endeavour to post some more results. The magnets are great for many things, but I found that the base (what I call an armature) had to be present first. I’ve posted a lot with magnets on various posts and links to other great things done with them, specifically…

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=9904&highlight=zsphere+challenge

#59

Well I had a few minutes to whip up another one to evaluate. I think I can safely move to the next step and add in the extra zsphere to control the jaw. We’ll see… :wink:

Picture 32.jpg

#60

OK here goes, test one and rather successful having the jaw bone, as it were. Seems to do what I want, will push it a little more as work this fella over.

This Igor, a disturbed mummy in every sense of the word. He was dug up for Halloween festivities. :wink:

He will be creepy in a toon sorta way…

Picture 33.jpg