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AlphaCentury, a Terrain Creation Tutorial

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#201

Zspheristan or a Zsphere Graveyard? Nonetheless I can almost feel the dry wind blowing up those zsphereian canyons and over the zspherian lakebed. Neato imagination my friend!

#202

Hansl:That is one beautiful image you’ve created there-for me it is right out of a madmans brain…no,no,no I’m not saying you’re a madman…just a hell’uv an image.
Well done friend!

#203

thank you amigos :slight_smile: madman is fine with me :smiley:

nada special, except that the terrain and frontrocks where made with adaptive skinned zspheres at density 1, birds at 2… no colours were used, except for the fog and the colorize diffuse of the material and some goofedup tweaking in render>adjustments:

  • juanloco :smiley:
#204

Three gems in a row Hansl… :+1:
(And I know gems!! :smiley: )

:sunglasses: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :sunglasses:

#205

thank you, gem-meister :slight_smile:

but now: end of gems and two first views at a finding* about alpha-century planes i made by chance yesternite and that some of you might find interesting:

[img]http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/cloudsfrac.jpg[/img] [img]http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/aftermathfrac.jpg[/img]

the irregular shapes in there appeared when i used the new command that comes with all 3d-tools: unified skinning. i have had very lil time to explore this further, but here is what i found out until now (please keep in mind that i tend to be a very stupid researcher, so dont take all i say below for granted and put a great “METHINKS” ahead of each of the sentences :)):

:b4: the effect will appear on unified-skinned "flat" 3D-tools only: plane, circle, terrain, no matter if tools are masked or not. :b4: for plane and circle you have to add some "z-depth" to get the effect (the default terrain has a "hill", so its not needed there, but of course it gets different when applying deformations) - meaning that you’ll have to use some deformations (like the alpha-century z-offset or gravity applied after rotating the plane/circle in the tool-preview window) on circle and plane. :b4: the more deformations or the more complex the alphacentury applied masking produced deformations (z-offset and others), the more unpredictable the outcome - kind of fractal-like, sometimes. the things depicted on top are skinned variations of their ground terrains. with the undeformed default terraintool you might get something regular like this: [img]http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/terrainmand.jpg[/img] :b4: the variations depend on the resolution of the original tool - and most likely depend on the resolution you choose for the skinned version as well

of course the skinned copies can be treated as all 3d-tools via: deformations>inflate, for instance :slight_smile:

i hope that some of you might find this worth of further explorations - i for my part hope to be able to use this for applying those foamy rings of white to waters, for instance.

  • juandel
  • dunno if it was ever mentioned yet, but in case it wasnt - well, its a finding :slight_smile:
#206

Neato explorations Juandel, I see all kinds of capabilities judging by the super surrealism here. I love those clouds!

#207

Well, you saved the best “gem” until last, Juandel. I think that magenta landscape with the birds is excellent. :+1: :+1: :+1:

I shall have to revisit Alpha Century one day - my efforts were pretty feeble. Perhaps I was disillusioned compared to what I had been able to produce using height-field maps in Terragen.

I found your experiments of last night very intriguing. This is definitely an area worthy of further exploration. Thanks for the idea. :+1:

#208

Wow Hansl, that second one is amazing…!!
It looks like a truly alien spacecraft to me hovering above a planet…And your experiments are always fascinating! :slight_smile:

:sunglasses: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :sunglasses:

#209

Interesting JuJu. I really like the cloud effect, I can see myself making use of that technique. :warning: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

#210

Cool experimentations Juandel! :+1:

#211

Really interesting results here, I like the pink shaded one best.
:slight_smile:

#212

thank you all for the very nice comments, ZBs! :slight_smile: Flycatcher: i never had a look into terragen (or any other landscaping app) so the alpha-century-way is the only way i know - and i loved it right from the start. i am pretty sure that anything you might miss at the current version will be added in future ones - and probably a few more things that no one even dreamt of (except Pixolator, probably ;)). as this thread is not a onemanshow i would really love others like you contributing into here and sharing their results… :slight_smile:

having had no luck until now integrating the irregular shapes i mentioned in my last post when doing water i did a quick one yesternite using the technique i described on Page 11 of this thread (“vista a la croc”) by importing a cropped part (the bodies) of this mongoose (? mongeese?) photo

i recently took at the zoo as a texture, converting texture to alpha and so on. surprisingly it looked like a landscape you can find south/southwest of Vienna :smiley: i added a few quickly sketched and grabbed trees the :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: DeeVee-way and turned the exported result into grayscale in PS, reimported it and played with render-adjustments - hope you’ll like!

  • juandel
#213

Very inovative Jaundel. I like the landscape, it looks very similar to what I saw in the restricted zone on Montserrat. Thanks for sharing, it is very much appreciated.
Joe
DeeVee

:+1: :+1: :+1: :+1: :+1:

#214

thanks, DeeVee! :slight_smile: luckily any volcanoes that might have been active here once upon a time have been geologically replaced - though the place the front part in the above pic reminded me of is located along a seismically rather active line - it is the northeastern end of the alps. some occasional rumbling - i hope this stays so.

next one is somewhat baroque:

[img]http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/lifelab3a.jpg[/img]

muchas y ultimativas gracias go to url-meister monsieur Frenchy Pilou, who pointed towards artificial life apps in cameyos fantastico custom filter thread for the first time and kept providing me in personal correspondence with links until he found the ultimate Artificial Life page for Mac-users, too. with one of the apps there i managed to create this symmetric alpha

[img]http://www.cyber-webs.com/zbrush/lablife3.jpg[/img]

with the about 10th try. i imported and did some alpha-centurying + a little inflate. once the plane was set i put a marker and did a second plane on another layer, which i brought into front in gyro-move-mode and whose material was set to transparent 95 and render>flatten-layers off. i changed the editbrush in transformation>modifiers graph and did the rings. a vertically switched texture grab of layer one was inserted as reflective map into the materials slot, and reflectivity + transparency graph were increased/tweaked. a slight sharpen was applied in PS postwork - omce i got cameyos brushes saved this wont be necessary anymore, i guess.

i hope you might find this as inspiring as i did Pilou’s research! those life-apps look like fun to no end!

  • juandel
#215

Hi Juandel
It’s not baroque :slight_smile:
It’s like an electron microscope view of atomic level of matter.
And it is ! Sugar, selt or other geometric strutures :slight_smile:
Amazing connection between different scaling vision mixed with different sort of programm ! Generating - Imaging - Sculpting :cool:
Thx for praising my research :slight_smile: It’s just for fun :slight_smile:
A very good site for Alife is http://www.rennard.org/alife/
Made by a frenchy :slight_smile: But in english too :slight_smile: great links inside !
And don’t forget the “Game of life” http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html
Here You can “play” to be “god creator” in direct and may be discover a new start generation of wonderful worlds ! Careful the addiction :slight_smile:
Have happy ZBrushing and Gamelifing :slight_smile:
Pilou :cool:
Ps Here you find a lot of programme about Artificial life :slight_smile:http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Artificial_Life/Cellular_Automata/
Coming from http://dmoz.org
Better than Google, the best research motor moderated by the Internauts themselves !!! Open Source philosophy :slight_smile: Try it !

#216

ahhh, the grip of duties is less vigorous these days, so i find a lil more time to spend with zbrush… once again, to get back into it, i did a few alphacentury experiments to start into z-world:


both have in common that i was experimenting with modified filterbrushes (5 type) before grabbing their alphas. in the first one it was a spraybrush filled canvas with helix-tool, the second one a 2d layer with two colors sprayed here and there, then filterbrushed, then grabbed.

hope you’ll like them :slight_smile:

  • juandel
#217

I’ve watched this post grow over the months and had assumed that is was people offering thanks for Pixolator’s initial tutorial.
Little did I realise what a wonderful area of the Forum it had become with a life and creative exploration all of it’s own. :+1: :+1: :+1:

#218

:slight_smile:

another try at creating a seatype alpha with the fiberbrush/drag rectangle/continuous orientation off. textured the plane with a vertically turned version of a background grab and fiddled with the three shader of double–spherical-intensity-mat… everything above sealevel is 2d, land done with dragrectangle stroke 3d-brush at varied rgb-intensities and zadd-off. done at default size, reimported as a texture to a customsized canvas with less height to stretch things a bit and to do postwork with several brushes :wink: hope you’ll like it!

  • juandel

<font color="#949494" size=“1”> December 05, 2002 Message edited by: juandel </font>

#219

That is a truly beautiful vista Juandel, a bit like the “Land Time Forgot”! You must have been inspired with this one, it looks like one of the old masters come to life. I love it :+1: :+1: :+1:

#220

very nice hansl…and ditto to digits…very very well done :+1: :+1: