Hi Frenchy,
You could say: "Two Challenges at the same time is a big task, and if you could do a Jewelled frog eating a bug, it would be even bigger.
You could also say Hodge Podge. (Hahdj-pahdj)
I really wanted to finish this frog’s model, but 1.55 is supposed to be out any minute. In 1.51 I need to finish editing the polys in the ‘reference’ pose it is in now. Then I would need to take it into one of my animation programs and bone it so that I could drastically re-pose the model without distorting the polygon structure too much. Then I could bring it back to ZBrush and render it, without having to redo the texture, since all of the polys would still be in their same position relative to the others, just stretched or squeezed a bit. Some texture touch-up still might be necessary.
With 1.55, I think I can produce an adaptive mesh that is much closer to my final goal, edit it’s shape even before producing a skin, and perhaps do some degree of posing within ZBrush. I’m not sure how well the mesh will maintain a certain configuration as you re-pose the ZSphere model. As long as it is close, performing small edits on the texture is still much faster than taking the model to another program, boning it, reposing it and touching up the polygons, and then bringing it back to ZBrush, and perhaps still needing to fix areas of texture stretch.
With a complex shape like this frog, it is much easier to texture with all of its limbs and toes spread out. But then you have to somehow get it into a natural pose. Of course, in ZBrush it is easy to just texture the model in 2.5D mode, after posing the ZSphere model exactly how you want it, editing the resulting skin, and placing it in the scene. But then I would have to re-texture the frog each time I used it, instead of just once with TextureMaster.
On the other hand, I plan to use this model, or a 1.55 version of it, to create many varieties of colorful leaf frogs, so I will be painting several different textures anyway, but that just multiplies the number of times I have to paint the frog if I only do it in 2.5D.
I think I’ve really figured out metal materials, though! I’m surprised no one else has used this type of metal material before. I think it is super-realistic. The reflection effect is using a custom texture in the Env.Reflection panel, and the rough texture is partly noise, and partly due to spherical blend and my seamless leather texture. I plan to improve it by creating a ‘fine scratch’ texture that should look better.
