Making pretty steady progress today.
I need some ideas for how to make the stabilizer nozzles seat better into the body of the tank. Suggestions?
Love where the tank is headed!!!
Gotta say, I love the “fog of war” in your render… BAD@$$!
Here are my two cents on the stabilizers… And by no means do I know anything about futuristic tanks… But… At first, if you didn’t know they are stabilizers, you might mistake them for some sort of propulsion device for the vehicle… I think if you showed more of the stabilizers, and how they function, the viewer would be able to make that connection… Maybe they are on some big hydraulic arms, that position themselves on the ground before the tank fires… If so, show those arms, have them fold up and get tucked close to the side of the body, not hidden under the body out of view. Maybe even show them in your pose. Have them stabilizing the vehicle as its firing missiles or lasers or whatever.
Again, just my two cents.
A side note…
I have to say, I’ve been following your work since you first started posting… Your growth is incredible. Seriously… Compare your first post, with your more recent ones.
Do you feel that you have grown as an artist, or do you simply have a better understanding of zbrush?
Very impressive, thats all… 
Thanks for your kind words, Corey! I guess I should’ve name those things a little differently. They’re meant to be like lift stabilizers, so the tank stays level as it hovers. But I love your idea about putting them on folding arms and it shouldn’t be that hard to accomplish either. I’m already brimming with ideas about how to do it which is always good.
I really love the fog thing, but I wish there weren’t a trade-off between “best” render mode and bpr. In best, I can use the fog but to me the render doesn’t come out as clean. In bpr, the render is cleaner and I get the option of transparency among other things, but I lose the option to have the fog. Oh well, I guess that’s what Photoshop is for. (This is all based on my assumption that I haven’t missed something about rendering, which in itself is a huge leap of faith)
As far as my progress, I truly, TRULY appreciate your comments. I honestly don’t know (or at least say publicly) if I’ve grown as an artist. I know my sense of composition and design has gotten better over the last three months or so, mostly due to viewing the works of art you and a lot of other professionals post here on a regular basis. And I’ve learned a ton about Zbrush too, again mostly from this great website. If somebody threatened me with waterboarding, I would have to say that it’s a tossup. I guess I have done some growing as an artist and I’ve learned just enough about Zbrush to make me dangerous.
Of course, for everything I know about Zbrush there are about a million things I don’t know. Add to that the things I do know, but conveniently forget or choose to ignore when push comes to shove. This tank is a perfect example. I knew that I shouldn’t keep the larger parts of the mesh as a dynamesh once I got to a certain point, but pushed right on past that. As a result I’m struggling to get the nice clean edges I got when working on the mech I did. But I’ll figure out a way to clean it up eventually. That’s half the fun! :lol:
WOW…
…Excellent machine inventions VoodooDad small_orange_diamond:)
Might be interesting to see that one posted on the previous page in here…in the old building enviroment taken into LightCap here in ZBRUSH, and use some of those fancy lighting setups, shiny colored reflections, and cast shadows that that really tie the piece into it’s enviroment in a way like only that new ZBRUSH feature LightCap can do…I haven’t tried half the stuff out in LightCap yet myself :D…but it seems by the look of the tutorial movies on it,…that it would really enhance your machines even more than they are now…:)…Just me thinking out loud again…
Keep up the Great work VoodooDad …Luv the idea of this HoverTank and you design on it so far…nice and streamlined for speed using Aerodynamics…small_orange_diamond:)
Glenn
Thanks Glenn. I’m planning on working with lightcaps on the mech eventually. Trying to build my hard-surface skills a little before I take that step, though. I haven’t even scratched the surface as far as knowing how to play with lightcaps and want to learn a lot more about it. I do love how one simple material change gave me exactly the weathered and worn look to the hard edges that I was looking for all along. Didn’t really have to do anything special to it, just a few layers of color and there it was.
Ummm… I’ll quit tooting my own horn now…
Stepping away from the tank for the moment after a new idea popped into my head. I was thinking about Corey’s earlier comment about a personal spacecraft. Well this isn’t a personal one-man craft, but it’s something I always had a yen to do since the original release of Star Wars. When I was a kid I read all the various fanzines I could get my hands on concerning how the special effects were achieved and I always wanted to build a huge star destroyer type of ship the way they did back then, by scrounging a million different model parts and sticking them together until they came up with something cool looking, I never had the time/resources/workspace to do it of course, but I have Zbrush now so I can do it the modern way!
Concepting of shapes right now.
cool works - shadow box ?
Thanks Gary! (That’s my first name too, btw :))
Yeah, I started each of these in shadowbox, just doodling shapes with the mask tools until a certain angle catches my eye, and then I try to see where I can go with it from there. I’ve fallen in love with pushing the limits in shadowbox as far as they can go with various shapes and angles. Once I feel I’ve reached that limit, I take it to a high-density dynamesh to finish blocking out the major structures. After that I just drop dynamesh, subdivide a couple of times and start throwing bits and pieces at the model to see what sticks. Feels really fun and creative like no other program I’ve used before.
Speaking of bits and pieces, here’s whats stuck so far;
Added details to engine and rear of ship;
Hi Gary, sorry I have been off the board for a bit, been having memory issues with my car (had to resort to decimating what I could to bring the file size down-after saving my HUGE file, it just became corrupted- and, bought a 16GB USB drive and made it the virtural memory area as my machine is maxed at 4GB physical memory). Anywho, the MECH, beautiful. The tank, way cool. And this space ship, it’s really coming out clean. I have learned so much from this project. One of the important lessons I have learned is to Retopo everything as I create it. This I know will drasticaly help keep my file size down. I can’t wait until Pixologic and Verold finish ‘QRemesher’. Sounds like Pixologics solution to Auto Retopology (maybe a hybird of Retopoloy and Dynamesh-without losing details… I hope). This tool alone is going to save knuckle head artists like me that just want to create without having to think about if our projects are going to choke ZBrush or the computer.
And you know, with your qoute above, I too remember those days. I would go over to my best friends house and we would mess around trying to build a space ship or two from left over parts of plastic model car kits. Man, I miss those days.
But, I agree, with ZBrush today, one can create anything. Now, wouldn’t it be cool if 3D printing cost as much as regular paper printing?
Best.
Ooooo, I can already see those engines glowing a cool light blue.
Thanks, Dragon. Those were the days, weren’t they?:lol: Hours and hours spent in the basement of my best friend, playing the original version of D&D back when it was just a small box with three plain paperback pamphlet sized books, throwing together model parts of car engines and jet fighters and thinking they looked cool… man, being an adult really sucks!:lol:
And doing a retopo is something else I need to learn. I’ve also decimated what I could (engine cones and the back details) but I’m still pushing 18m polys. I’ve stretched other models to 35m at some points without a crash, but I don’t want to push too hard and lose everything. I would think a retopo on this ship would be fairly easy with mostly sharp angles and not much rounding off, so that will be my next step, probably before I add much more detail.
I’m really wishing there was a “greeble” type plugin or script for Zbrush. I’ve searched here and google, but all I’ve found are older posts that apply to long dead versions of Zbrush that don’t seem to work now. If anyone knows of an easy way of adding random mechanical looking detail quickly please let me know.
I may have solved the detailing problem; I found some decent blocky alphas, lay them out, invert and inflate value of 5. Then clear the mask and overlay a more detailed alpha and inflate it by a value of 2. Doesn’t look that great up close, but pulled back it looks okay.
The most fun I’ve had with Zbrush so far! It’s amazing how you can use one very basic alpha, torture it by flipping, rotating and hanging it upside down by its ankles till it screams, and coming up with so many different looks! Love it! YOU! There in the second row! You’re not loving it! LOVE IT, DAMN YOU!!!
You have made my day with this sculpture…
But you knew that all ready…
Corey
Thanks for the love, Corey! I thought only my day was made lol.
Finished with the smaller details. Now to add one big gun and a bunch of small turret guns. Then start searching desperately for info on using lightcaps…
This looks so bad@$$!
I love the hangers for the smaller fighters.
How did you create the forcefield effect, using transparency in zbrush, or is this photoshop?
Keep it up, brutha!