hi guys, is it possible to import a 3d object (for example a shoe) then scatter the 3d shoe many times as a brush would?
I’m not sure about a way to scatter a piece of geometry via a brush AS geometry (rather then a 2.5 image), but you can use the “append mesh” function for zspheres.
Marcus has a very handy plugin for making this easy:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=94752&highlight=insert+local+mesh
Draw a base zsphere and attach a zsphere to the top and the bottom. In transpose move, draw this out into a long line and click to add as many zspheres as you want your to repeat. Go into transpose move and drag the zspheres around randomly. Go to Transpose scale and randomly scale them.
Press the “add mesh to sphere” button from the plug in. You will be asked to select the file of the mesh. Then you will be prompted to select the connector mesh…just hit cancel for the connector mesh.
Finally make an adaptive skin and your randomly generated meshes are in your tool box.
this is actually a very beautiful thing if u think about it… using this and some patience you can make a particle effect for scenes like water drops, rain, a wall exploding into bits from a bullet, blood splatter in air and on wall… just using simple objects and some patience with setting up the spheres… i just wish it were a little easier to mass allign the zspheres so that the resulting particles are all oriented the same way. as it stands though its a royal pain once you start moving pieces and rotating pieces etc… to get the allignment to fit… it’d be harder to notice with smaller particles but i really wish there was a way to manually alter the orientation and location of a zsphere (using numbers and not just transpose) after the spheres been laid down… would make it so much easier to get a precise organization out of it and not just be throwing from the hip.
You can play around with radial symmetry (sp) for some interesting effects, but overall “scatter” is the operative word. Although they come out as seperate polygroups to help with manipulation, its tedious to offset and rotate them all.
In my latest test, I carefully drew out a line and made sure the zspheres were all oriented in the same direction based on the shading and got this (there’s some pattern here, but I can’t figure out what influences it).
this is what i got from some careful straight lines and lots and lots of zpheres scaled way down… if u use a simple teardrop shaped double zsphere based polymesh as the object you can get some incredibly nice scatter fields for explosions
just to note… this is 375x6 particles… i cloned the original and rotated a few times… each particle is maybe 80-120 polys …forget exact amount
Excellent!
if you have a little physics knowhow and some patience i cant imagine a simpler way to something mid explosion using it… just use the zsphere lines to sketch out the trajectory and bam… thats actually the next test i wanna try… seeing how zsketch translates to this.
sorry to double post but wanted to keep this seperate and as clear as possible
tried out using zsketch with the mesh insert plugin and i get a nice interesting effect… it doesnt quite work right but the effect it provides is very very very useful.
start with one zsphere… draw out a random zsketch , (i would assume try to keep it relatively small at first so as not to overwhlem the script. ) turn off the edit sketch mode and add another zsphere off of the main sphere of any size…(the plugin prompts you to select a working mesh if you dont)
with edit sketch still off run the plugin, and select any small obj to insert, and cancel at the next step…it will actually pick up the zsketch and try to insert at every point on the sketch… after it finishes loading something interesting happens… it doesnt insert the proper mesh into the zspheres… but it actually converts the zsketch into an editable set of zspheres… you can now drag them wherever… delete individual spheres. amd generally work on it like it was a regular set of zspheres and not a sketch… i can see using something like this to rough out the sketch of a item, run script and convert it to a much more refineable set of zspheres… and then bring the final product to a polymesh…
just food for thought