Hi, I’m trying to create fish scales. Anyone have an innovative way to doing this besides actually sculpting them?
Hi, if by innovative you mean “procedurally generated” I guess the answer is no. Why don’t you create a alpha brush in Photoshop ? Then you can use it in ZB very easily and quickly.
I just made a fish w/ scales. Here’s two ways to do it.
1 - Load a plane. Make polymesh and divide it as needed. Sculpt one big scale across the whole plane, leaving some room around the edge. Make it clean, using various brushes and use the pinch brush near the edge of the scale. Don’t worry about much indention under the scale, as this method only picks up the depth of the canvas, not the 3d shape. When you’re happy with the scale, use shift while rotating to snap it to the view. Go to the alpha palette, or alpha drop down menu, and hit “GrabDoc”. This takes the canvas depth and makes a 16 bit alpha to use as a brush. Save the alpha. Load your fish and subdivide as high as you will for the whole project. On that highest sub div level, use the drag rect as your brush type, and the scale as your alpha with the standard brush. Viola! Even better yet, on that sub division level, make a 3d layer. Do only the scales on that layer. Then you can adjust their intensity after you are finished! Damn I love ZBrush. If I was at work, I’d just give you my scale alpha, but it’s not hard to make. Worth going through the steps to learn as well.
2 - Make an individual scale as a mesh. Sculpting it from a flattened cube or sphere for instance. Then use the mesh insert brush to click and drag or brush on the scales. I know that this will actually give you more 3d shape to each scale, but I don’t know how to use these brushes. Read up on em if interested, they could be the better solution.
In my project, I used method one. It still worked wonders. However, I ended up going back over each scale with the pinch and move brushes which yielded fantastic results! Took some tedious work, but it was worth it. I love how it looks.
Regarding the plane method. You can do this anytime you’re working on something. I often will be working on a sculpt, and come to a point where I want to repeat something over an area of it. Or maybe just make my textured brush. Simply click on the plane 3d in the tool palette, make poly mesh, subdivide and sculpt it, grab doc and you’re off! Good little trick to keep up the sleeve.
ALSO, depending on your scale alpha, you may end up seeing some of the edges of the plane when sculpting with it. Use the adjustments in the alpha drop down menu to tweak your alpha, such as the alpha adjust curve. Play around with them, and if you stumble upon a something you like, then hit “make modified alpha”. It add a 1 to the end. Save that new alpha and get back to sculpting. Adjusting your focal shift of your brush will also change the results.
Good luck!