ZBrushCentral

Alice Cooper

ZBrush Artworks
#61

newface.jpg
Latest Hair Render.

Here it is folks the latest of the many hair tests. It’s looking more like hair now and more realistic (due to motivation and guidance from Joe). I think it still needs more ‘chaos’ as the hair’s still way too neat. In most 1986-91 Alice Cooper shots it looks like he never brushed his hair, so I’m going to try my best to get as close as possible to that look.

At times I think it would have ben so much easier to make a character with short hair. :lol: But not half as much fun though.
Enjoy

Wayne…

#62

yeah and think about all the cool stuff you have learned so far!!

keep at it!

taking notes for the AC tutorial?

#63

It’s coming along well. I was thinking about your work with Alice a bit while on vacation.

#64

alice-betterskinshader2.jpg
Work Done on Nose and new Skin Shader

I’ve made a bit of a decision. As I’ve got two ideas for compositions and have put a fair bit or work into the zbrush renders, I’m going to have two final compositions. One will be rendered within Zbrush, and a totally different one done within maya. yeah its twice the work but it seems a shame to waste the work in either package when I can produce ‘two for the price of one’.

I’ve hopefully now got the nose looking more like Alice’s, and some work has been done around the eyes and on the shader itself. It amazes me how much I’ve learned doing this model! Glad your all liking it so far.
Enjoy

Wayne…

#65

Looks very good.

#66

[attach=24110]alice-SSS-Tests.jpg[/attach]
Yeah I know the textures missing from his ear (old Map)

This is my latest Subsurface shader test in mental ray (Maya). Finally he looks less like a shiney gas filled balloon! I’ve added a bump map for some pores as the displacement map made in zbrush just isn’t showing the detail I need. So I made a very, very simple one in photoshop with a bit of noise. I added some final gathering to see what the render times were like (6-7mins). Obviously I’ll be doing a ‘proper’ detailed bump map in zbrush for the final render.

Right now I’m trying to work out where to plug my primary blocking out spec map into in the fast skin shader. If anyone has a clue how to do this (without maya moaning on…and on…and on… and refusing to render) please let me know before I go mad. Before this model I’d never had cause to learn about sub surface shaders, so I’m learning one helluva lot on this project.
I’ll be doing a tutorial on some of the things I’ve learned once the project is finished for those interested.

Enjoy and happy new year
Wayne…

Attachments

alice-SSS-Tests.jpg

#67

[attach=24112]damnfine-big.jpg[/attach]
SubSurface Shader and New Bump Map

I’ve been putting a bit or work into getting my subsurface shader right in mental ray. There’s still a few problems with the skin pores bump map (nasty line near the neck), but it’s not far away. Also I’ve done some work on the eye’s subsurface shader, although I’m still not happy with the specularity on it. Finding where to apply my primary spec map in the fast skin shader is still elluding me. If anyone has this info any chance of a hint?
Happy New year

Wayne…

Attachments

damnfine-big.jpg

#68

AliceCooper-web.jpg
Probably the final image of Alice Cooper himself before moving onto other stuff in the composition.

High Res Image: http://www.dashdotslash.net/images/3dmodels/alice/AliceCooper.jpg

This image was rendered in Zbrush and is basically finished as far as the alice cooper part goes for my Zbrush render. Now its onto making some other stuff for this composition. I have to admit to being pretty pleased with this. You can see my source image below. The main problem is that Alice cooper look’s vastly different in just about every photo that you find. I’ve done my level best to get this as close to photo realism as possible. I should also add that I’m aiming for a slightly over exposed effect as well, as I felt it adds to the realism. (How many perfect photos do peolpe really take? LOL)
Enjoy

Wayne…

[attach=24114]alicesourceimage1.jpg[/attach]
Source Image

Attachments

alicesourceimage1.jpg

#69

lookin good…looking forward to the rest of the show!

#70

AliceCooper-eyework.jpg
Some eye work done to bring them to life.

Wayne…

#71

Hi Wayne, nice work so far, the likeness is coming along rather well. :+1:
Looking forward to seeing the “other stuff” you plan on adding to the comp.
Nice touch in adding the tophat btw.
Rock on! :slight_smile:

#72

Alice is looking better the more and more you do him. It’s the best bit of work I’ve seen you do. You would get 20 stars off me. :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

Kat.

#73

5-BW-web.jpg

I thought I’d join in with the ‘black and white’ fever this week by converting alice to black and white just for kicks. Apart from that I’ve been having a few days off from him, time to catch up on some other things.

Wayne…

#74

hair5.jpg
Mental ray render with Shave and a Haircut

Yep the lighting sucks on this one (nasty hard lines everywhere!), but as I’m currently fighting maya to get it to work for more than 5 mins at a time its a wonder this one is here at all. Unfortunately I’ve had to use a previous ‘shave’ hair render, so the hairs not as good as it finally willl be. Photoshop used for comping and cropping the image only.

Wayne…

#75

Nice work bro,
You might want to give the renderer “Turtle” a whirl with Maya.
It’s more stable than MentalRay and way faster.
They will give you a license trial at ILLUMINATE LABS.COM
Hope it helps save you some stress, Great work :+1:

#76

I have turtle already installed on my machine, the only reason I didn’t use it for this was version 2 was quite a bit different to the previous ones. Displacement didn’t seem so straightforward, and to be honest I had enough trouble getting mental ray to displace Zb maps properly LOL. If you know of a guide fo turtle pass me a link and I’ll give it a go.
The trouble isn’t really with mental ray but with maya itself. It’s really got me banging my head of brick walls as there’s no reason for it. Re-installs and even formats don’t solve it so I have to assume its a hardware issue. But until I know exactly what hardware is up the spout its pointless buying anything else.

I’m one of those guys who does a milion render tests of shaders and lighting till I am happy with it. So only being able to do one render per boot up is killing me! Hey if turtle wil work better then I don’t mind redoing the shader etc if it just doesn’t crash.
Ahead stress factor 10 Mr Worf!:lol:

Wayne…

#77

Thought about what you said and wanted to mention something in case you missed it when your using Turtle.
Leave the Zbrush map unchecked and make sure to render as a subdivision surface. This must be checked or you will get really crap results. You don’t have to convert your model from polys to subdivisions but you need to tell TURTLE to render them as if they were.
This also goes for using RENDERMAN but it is a hidden box in the attribute section. It makes me laugh when a software company does things like that because displacements are hard enough already so… why make it difficult to find important settings?
Also remember that just like MentalRay, Turtle is also aware of scale. So scale up those models and adjust the offsets appropriately. Again the same is true for Renderman…
I’m going to post some displace tests tonight on my thread if you want to compare notes.

I get great displacements with TURTLE so try the subdivision trick… hope that was of some help bro, keep up the great work.

#78

great model!!!..man is Alice Cooper scary looking tho XP! Keep up the good work.

#79

haha thanks for the tips odhinn!

I think they are making it difficult for a couple reasons…

  1. they are still catching up to yesterdays technology made possible by Pixolator who really is from the year 3048.

  2. they want you to be able to use zbrush stuff till they figure out how to program it into their stuff but won’t make it easy til they do…because they don’t want you to know they are already giving you yesterdays technology tomorrow.

  3. if it was easy then you wouldn’t send your whole modelling team to master classes to learn stuff tomorrow they needed 3 months ago so they can produce stuff yesterday.

ya know…the usual!:wink: