ZBrushCentral

Fibermesh question

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve made a feather using fibermesh by creating a cone for the quill or stem and masking off the side to produce fibers. Once the fibers are made and positioned how I want them, I accept them and they become a subtool. If I do a BPR render at this point it looks great. Now I want to combine the quill with the fibers so that it is one subtool to be used as a micromesh. Once I combine the two subtools into one feather and do a bpr render the fibers don’t render like they did before. They don’t get smoothed out and have a nice round shape to them anymore but look just like hard edged flat polygons. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get around this?

I’ve attached a couple of images to illustrate. Thanks!

Before

After

Attachments

before.jpg

after.jpg

#2

Hey,

Zbrush seems to treat the rendering of fribers differently from other geometry; if i remember corectly there are some render settings that control this; I’ve tried looking through Zbrush and searched the .info site, but I can’t find this anywhere. However, I only mention these settings for refenrece; to achieve the results you want I’d try increasing the number of segments and profiles in the fibermesh palette during their creation, and fine tuning how the fibers taper.

By merging your fibers with other non-fiber geometry you’re making them ‘normal’ geometry.

All the rendering options do (and this is what you see when you render fibers as in your first screen shot) is adjust how the rendering engine pretends that the hairs have a higher polycount than they do; so by increasing the profiles and segments you should be able to achieve this.

Hope this helps.

<edited to make more sense>

#3

Okay, I’m attempting to get back to adding feathers to my bird. I’m trying to use either an image mapped to the fibermesh or using a micromesh of a sculpted feather similar to the one posted earlier in this thread.

Has anyone tried feathering a bird with good results using the new fibermesh? If so, can you give any advice?

I’ve masked off my area and added the fibermesh, however from the images attached you can see that some of them are outside the mesh and some of them fall inside the mesh facing the opposite direction. Is there a way to fix this easily? I’m also having issues with the texture. What format is best (jpg, png, psd, etc.)? Also, even though I have transparency and antialising turned on, I get a black edge around the feather as well as really jagged edges when rendering. The texture is also really stretched. Does the image need to be square and the length and coverage match the dimensions of the texture like shown in the butterfly example here on pixologic.com?

Really just looking for some pointers on the best direction to go and how to get the fibermesh to follow and flow with the normals direction of the mesh.

Thanks for any help!

#4

the problem you ha in the first example that the BPR render it 2 times subdivided , an after you convert it to geometry you lose the ability to render it the same way, I would suggest to convert the BPR to geometry that allow you to keep the same quality you looking for , also you can change the flat panels using higher values of the profile while creating the fiber , more segments for more curvy fibers , a 3 profiles would be more that enough , but if you convert the BPR to geometry you get exactly what you see in your render . If you going to replace the fiber with micro mesh be sure that the objects u use have the right UV’s , no matter it is figure or square , alpha maps works better on high resolution meshes in Zbrush , if the mesh have low resolution you will get bad looking edges .

#5

Thanks for the reply Mec4D! So going with the texture map on the fibermesh I was able to get passed the weird rendering issue seen in my last reply by setting the Sides down to 2. However, if I want to have a feather that is really fine at the edges, I’m getting a black border around each one at render time as seen in the below screen grabs. The first one is the feather that has a mask around it and I simply add a black background to it which should be transparent when doing a BPR render. As you can see this is not the case.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remove the black edge?

Thanks!

feather.JPGfeather_fibermesh.JPG

#6

I would be interested to see how one could make a bird this way, apart from the flight and tail feathers a birds body generally appears like a solid form. Contour feathers (the bulk of the body covering) dont look like this, theyre short with a very very thin shaft’, but hey, you got my interest, good luck!

#7

first this type of feathers looks like almost semi-plume but still like down feathers as the end need to be more contour and scaled down , the black edges are from the alpha as the planes you used are to low resolution compared to the alpha details , or maybe you rendered on low level details but it looks like first issue, it should render just fine outside zbrush . The upper layers of the feathers should be as tight as the fish scales without spaces .

#8

Thanks again for the replies! The previous example was just a test of a more plume-like feather and not really what I’m after space wise.

What I’m trying to re-create is from the concept art of the Alice in Wonderland Dodo Bird located here: http://images.wikia.com/aliceinwonderland/images/2/2a/Dodo_Bird_Concept1-852x1024.jpg.

From the concept image, the main body feathers seem to have a soft plume feel to them while being somewhat layered in a fish scale fashion. It also seems that it would have feathers similar to that of an Emu as well. Just really trying to determine the best way to accomplish this using Zbrush and the new fibermesh/micromesh features along with the BPR renderer. I also want to achieve a similar look using Maya and Mental Ray.

I really appreciate your feedback and any other suggestions you may have. I’m attempting to create a feather similar to this as well that could be used for the contour feathers but not sure of the best way to go about it.

http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/morning-dew-goose-down-feather-.jpg