I had already logged off, Hansl, and was getting ready to leave my studio, and had a feeling I should check the Forum one more time…Weeellll…Ya drew me in Z-Bud! These last experiments are wonderful!
(When is your book, ‘Strange Worlds And Fractal Dreams’ coming out? 
)
and another !!
the water is beautiful and the landscape too
thank you, Sarum & SC! 
the publisher just informed me that, if the book will be printed at all, it will happen posthumously - but that i should please pay my share for printing expenses in advance (=right now) :rolleyes:
ok, next is another combo of modelling and alphacentury:
i set out with a default plane and created a volcano. then i doubled the default canvas size (in order to get an higher-res-alpha - i am not sure if that is necessary, but thats what i did), filled it with a colour and placed the volcano into its center (seen from above) and with simplebrush and a few default alphas created the surroundings… this bird-view was mrgbz-grabbed, the document reduced to its default size and the grabbed alpha applied to a 320x240 initialized plane for which the height-setting in the draw-window was reduced to 75. negative z-offset at about 30 was applied twice. mucho fiddling with materials and default-textures to get something looking lavalike. sky and greenery (palmleaves are at hand in mine and the Z-Tool-box (sorry, searchfunction does not work right now) and a few foreground lava-rocks were added on layers of their own. only when reimporting the exported pic i realized that it was too boring so sillyme started adding the eruption with alpha- and bumpbrush to the flat pic :rolleyes: finishing with shadingenhancer + sharpen/blur-brush and fiddling with adjustments in render-palette.
i hope its not too dark on your screens, ZB’s!
- juandel
Wow, Hansl thats a really great Vulcano
Thank you for the script 
stargo
It’s fine on mine, Hansl…
And that’s another Alpha MeisterPiece!!!
after seeing juandel volcano pic i had to re do mine to add a little life to it 
i used this Tool to make the Lava / lava Rocks http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=005739
on page 2 is the old volcano pic.
i used this as (Material Texture)Not Texture but (Material Texture)and set the bumps up with reflectivty high using this pic called hot Lava 
Well, this is my second attempt at making a texture using the AlphaCentury procedure. (The first one didn’t have much depth and it fell victim to the delete key.) I do have two questions. Once I create the alpha and the texture, is it possible to keep the alpha and add more color to the texture? If so, how?
And in my attached picture, if you look at the lower right corner of the picture, you’ll see a place where the landscape mesh wasn’t sized quite right. (There were two layers in this picture, the landscape and the sky.) I merged the two layers and select color from the surrounding area, but I can’t seem to get it to blend in to cover up the area. When I apply the color, it comes out very dark in that area, even though I sample colors from that area in the picture before I paint. Even closing down ZBrush and restarting doesn’t seem to help. So what am I missing? 
thats a hotissimost volcano, EZ! in german we have a metaphor for going beyond the limits of something which translates literally as “blowing up the frame” and thats exactly what yours is doing 
thank you all for your kind comments!
Kevin: thats a very peaceful vista with a lovely imbedded z-river and very nice color-scheme!
as for your questions:
i do not know about the merging part (as i use the merge layers scarcely only, i love to have things on separate layers) but it might help to place another version of your landscape tool in front down there and pull it into front (dragging downward outside the gyro in move or rotate-mode) and scale/rotate/move it towards the right so that only one or two peaks of it are left to be seen on the canvas to cover up the problem zone.
as for adding more colours to your texture without changing the terrainized plane there are at least two ways (that come into my mind at this early hour):
first thing i would do is to duplicate the texture (textures>inventory>dup) to save your original version in case you like it better than the one you experiment with. now with this texture selected you could
a) either create a new layer, deactivate all the others, and fill the empty canvas with the texture by hitting the f-key. now you can apply all colours you want with for instance simple brush or any other tool, then use mrgbz-grabber again to capture it as yet another texture, deactivate/delete the layer, load the terrained plane again (having placed a marker helps a lot :)) and apply the new won texture to it after entering edit-mode. or
b) with the duplicate texture applied load the texture master script and paint onto the editable landscape-tool with any tools you want.
another way to add colours without refining the texture is to play with the colours of the light(s) and/or fog at depth 1 and 2. some of my vistas are monocolor tools without texture and all colour in them comes with lighting/fog. you might even leave the mask of the applied alpha on the tool to achieve additional colourshades.
just a few ideas. of course you can apply colours directly onto the snapshot landscape without doing any of the above. this works much better when the landscape is on a layer of its own as there wont be no spillovers to the skylayer (take care to paint with z-off)
i hope this helps!
below is my first try/study at creating something mesa-like obviously there’s still a lot of explorations to do alphawise or i change my mind and go for ruins
- juandel
Thanks for the tips, Juandel. And very image is very nice. It looks alot like a photograph.
Kevin
I was fooling around with AlphaCentury the other night and came up with this image. 
ahh, those are lovely reflections, DeeVee!
i have made use of your excellento watermaking technique in the below one:
and found it reasonable to include a few of ed-the-atoms(blahblah :)) seagulls once again into a vista i used a reflected map material for the water with the grabbed texture of the island and sky in S1 instead of a default one. surf as well as shadingenhancer and highlighter work was done after exporting and reimporting a bestrender as a texture and filling the canvas with flatmaterial on.
the below smog-cityscape was quickly done with an alpha i grabbed after running one of WingedOnes great SpaceStation scripts (i think it was the third one or the one for creating a texture).
thanks for viewing!
- juandel
Wow Juandel that cityscape is really incredible, I would greatly appreciate an insight into how you created it.
I have tried to do the same in the past but gave up after getting totally frustrated.
hi, Mik!
thank you for your enthusiasm!
as mentioned above i used one of WingeOnes great scripts he posted with his spacestation project as a basic alpha. i just rechecked it: it was number 3. anyway, this script as well as his fantastico random.txt (see a bit further down there) make use of changing the canvas-size, so i am pretty sure they wont work properly in demo-mode. as far as i remember it is not possible to import alphas in demo-mode as well, so i am afraid it wont help you when i post the final result of the script here as a .jpg for you to import it as a txture and grab it with the mrgbz-grabber and use as an alpha the alphacentury way 
hmmm, in case you are good at scripting (i aint) you could try to edit Winged-Ones script, delete the canvas-size changing part and modify the values for the center cube and the random specifications to those of the default canvas.
anyway, i made use of bigger canvas-size myself: after i had pirated WO’s alpha i doubled the default canvas, filled it with a greyish colour and used the simple brush with drag-rectangle stroke type. i just filled one corner, then hit shift+s to snapshot it and then “w”, dragged it to another place, hit “e”, changed a little size, snapshot it once more, “w” dragged it somewhere else and so on. it helps to rotate the alpha to add to diversity now and then. then i grabbed this multialpha-layer and thus created a hi-res alpha consisting of multiple WingedOne-alphas. this one was applied to a hi-res plane (SH and SV off), and negative z-offset values were used to let them boxes grow.
to achive the perspective i held down the shift key while clicking the perspective distortion button in the draw palette and then clicked into the value slider left to it and, without releasing the mousebutton i picked a spot on the canvas where i wanted the perspective to be. only then i started drawing the plane and placing it in gyro-mode… some fiddling with fog-depths, intensity and back/front colours, a best render: voila! thanks to WingedOnes great script it didnt take more than about 30 minutes.
in demo-mode and without a script, i am afraid its a bit harder: choose the cube-tool, switch off SH and SV, paint a cube, snapshot it, displace it in move mode, scale it, snapshot again, move (drag some in front by moving the cursor downwards outside of the gyro) and so on, until the canvas is filled with different sized cubes sitting above each other seen from above. then use the mrgbz-grabber and make an alpha out of it, that can either be applied directly to a plane or used with 2.5d-brushes in dragrectangle-mode to achieve even more detailed alphas.
hope this helps and sorry for the length of my reply!
- juandel
here’s my first alpha terrain work. I too plundered WingedOne’s borg texture script.
nothing to explain, Juandel masterfully did it all. 100% zbrush - cloudy sky painted on a plane3D and then placed at an angle with the ground. all in all, 2 hours
kisses
cneofotistos, your image is missing. 
I’d love to see it.
Nice work on the city scape Juandel. I’ll have to try that sometime myself. Reminds me a little bit of Courascant from Star Wars.
jaundel you did a great job on that seascape. I like it a lot.
Also the modifications used when creating the water.
It appears as if that script is being used.
.
My goodness, all these are absolutely georgeous!! I am so jealous! There must be something I am missing. I ran the script 10 times, made notes and I have yet to get past the mask point. Everytime when I clear the mask. There is nothing left but a flat absolutely blank plane. PLEASE can someone tell me what I am missing or doing wrong??
I purchased this program on the strength of what I saw it can do… but for the life of me I cannot make anything work!!
north star try this on the top pic and the link to the left of it is the same thing http://www27.brinkster.com/ezbrush/mainTools.html
look for (alpha Century Builder) it a tool it kind of a short cut to help you make these pic the ending was left out because that a option for the user to deside what he likes
Essentially, NorthStar, you have to use the Offset deformer before you clear the mask. (And make sure the orange X, Y, and Z modifiers are set correctly.)
But EZ’s script should take care of all that.
EZ thank you I will try that suggestion.
And Mulvo I did have the deformer offset on z as per the script and set to -50 as per the script. But it seems to reset itself to 0 before I clear the mask. Any idea why it would do that??
I really appreciate the help you people are offering. I intend to master this thing if it take all of my whole 2 weeks vacation to do it!!! :rolleyes: