Halloween Bat for all...

[feureau]

Jason, I think I’ve stubled onto that script a while ago, but well, it’s buried under threads. Anyway, I still have to start from the beginning so I decided to do so by deleting moving etc.

Also, do you want us to post our obj/polymesh here or on that webdav thing you mentioned earlier?
(webdav? webdev?)

Also, for the final pic, will there be a theme or will it just be a lineup pic? I think it’d be neat if we could preset a background and maybe mark some location where the bats could go so people could claim their bat’s mark and pose them appropriately.

Then after that, maybe post it on the halloween challenge? http://pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=38797 (If we can make the time)

[Mr.Monster]

Jason,

Their’s a little free room now for a PM or two. *The maid has kindly managed to empty the small waste basket near my work desk. (She only does it when it’s pay day, wink, wink! )

Ok, I want to play too! Let me first get a little shut eye, (it’s 3:40 am here in Prague), and I am seeing Draw size and Focal shift rings on the insides of my eye lids! Yikes!
I will take Seńior Hallowen ZBat out for a spin tomarrow. Loooooks like fun!!

~BW

[Atwooki]

K Jason I’m in now
Had a little time the last couple of evenings to get to this stage with the little critter…

[Jason_Belec]

Alright Atwooki, nice start! Mr. Monster it will be cool!

feureau, I will make a webdav available and provide instructions. I agree on the set, I was thinking that over today. Open to suggestions, I was sorta going to wait and see what everyone came up with and add them as it seemed fit. It might change a bit, not sure. However I am open to any suggestions.

I was initially thinking a simple cave surface, rocks, and all our bats placed about with the same light and shader. Or we could do the Justice League hero line up left to right. Or…

If you want to provide more than 1 pose, that is also great as it will fill up the scene.

[Atwooki]

Alrighty; minor update here… gonna fix the mouth and nostrils next, but dreading getting onto the feet (no symmetry to work off) and get some texturing in place…

Chris

[feureau]

14 hours and no post? Well, here’s a free bump.

Jason, please no Justice Leage lineup pic. It’d look good for a poster on a convention but it’s just too plain.
Another suggestion: a prehistoric kinda scene with cliff, beach on the bottom and oceans and the bats mingling on the beach, cliffs, some flying etc. One bat crashed onto the cliff. LOL

Just a quick update.
I had to start over due to the claw replacement therapy. I think the claw’s too big. No eyes yet. And the torso’s still rough. Although the render has certainly improved. Thanks to Jason for modified (and original pixolator) lights-material.

The nuzzle part of the head looks like snoopy’s head at this point. LOL

So, 121 anyone? Thanks in advance.

after post edit: oooh, Atwooki beat me to the post by a minute. No matter.

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[Jason_Belec]

Atwooki, looks great - what did you do to the feet? I know, Iknow, used symmetry!! Hahaha, it still isn’t correct in Zbrush and I did this script fast so I didn’t go back and correct for it. If you had masked from the knees down, symmetry would work without messing the footsies onthis guy.

Nice feureau, the special shader actually is what I use to view form when posing, not toon, but I have lots of toon shaders if you like. As for posing - rules are on the zsphre thread, but to be quick, each zsphere can only be rotated in 1 axis!! If you try to make it do more than that - wammo! Equivalent to ‘gimble-lock’ in animation apps.

Everything I see in you image can be fixed, drop to lowest res and work up with the smooth tool selected and work those areas back into place. It’s mostly because the script has different resulting zsphere structure on Mac/PC so I can’t make a truly universal file. (Bad Zbrush, Bad!) It can be overcome, Atwooki and I have proven it. Just not for this bat, sorry.

I like your scene idea, I started a nice matte this morning. Hope to get back on it later and post something and people can mark where they want their bat to go. Yeah, yeah, Hell - I know, I know…

[feureau]

Jason, glad you liked the idea. And thanks for going thru all this trouble for us. Great job. Hell, yeah!

I thought the shader was toon because it generates all those lines in the second pic that doensn’t appear on all other shaders.

On rotation, how could I make sure I’ve only rotated on 1 axis? It seems Zbrush rotations seems to rotate on the XY plane. (the monitor screen plane) Gimbal lock stinks yet you always get gimbal locks once in a while. The fourth pic was smoothed on the lowest level, but the mesh explosion ascended up to the higher level.

On symmetry, the script generated a mesh on a Y axis symmetry while Z defaults to X, my mesh blew up when I clicked on smart resym without thinking. Also, seems the mesh will blow up if you smart resym without first resym the mesh. Does sound this similar to your problem, Atwooki? On my workstation this happens with the default bat and my modified zsphere bat. And it’s curious too, Jason, why do you work on a Y axis symmetry? What software do you export your meshes to?

Is your toon shader the ones posted on this forum some time ago? (I got some toon shaders from here but which came from where escapes me right now)

[Atwooki]

Here’s my last update…
As I’m unable to find a way of getting these ziff toes back in place - because rotating one toe rotates a different on on the other foot unsymmetrically for instance , I guess that’s it for me with this; unless I was to spend hours fiddling with it… and don’t have time for that unfortunately ;(

Anybody on a PC (or MAC of course) is welcome to check out the ZTL here:

http://www.custom3d.co.uk/zb/hallo_bat3.zip

cheers

Chris

[Jason_Belec]

Rotate from the body out zsphere by zsphere, only rotate each in a particular direction, simplest way to describe it without practice.

Symmetry is an issue with certain structures in zspheres. It can be overcome, but I hadn’t intended doing all the work and Ihad tolet the script run on each of your machines and the result is slightly different ffor Mac and PC users. Just don’t blindly click those buttons!

I work on different axis to explore things. This one just took off in that direction, but it is not the source of the problems. I usually throw it in maya for all of a few seconds to export either to Motion Builder or out to RIBs for rendering. Maya has pretty much become a container and not much more around my lab of horror.

A lot of toon shaders…
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=21627&page=3&pp=15

I was messing around and roughed out a few ideas, started to like this one and before I worked it up I thought I’d provide everyone with a chance to influence this as well.

[feureau]

Atwooki: I downloaded your ztl and will look into it. If it can be fixed, will you continue working on it?

Oooh, new shader to play with Love that toon 'specially the one by stumpf. Thanks.

Ooh, is motionBuilder as good as its cracked up to be? I use maya too. I was a bit baffled when I found it in Y axis symmetry. I tried liquidMaya but only managed to render out a plain old ugly sphere. LOL It is still a bit rough around the edges. Looks promising though. But why didn’t they raise legal issues with liquid as they did with BMRT? oh, getting OT.

The background you sketched out looks promising. But I’m having problem imagining where the bats could hang around other than on the rock bridge and some flying on the holes. Maybe one perched on one of them teeth-like rocks? How did you make the rock bridge? Instanced on? I think I saw a script around here somewhere to ‘spray’ on meshes. Was that it?

[Atwooki]

Jason
Given time, I’d happily carry on rotating this and that to realign the ziffs, but other projects call right now

feureau - Once I’m done with some concepts I have to do (quick sketches) then if there’s still time I’d like to finish this off, and thanks for checking it out
At each preview I’m back up to the top level again which also slows things down a lot - preferably I’d hide all except the lrgs for BOTH ziff-view and preview, but it ain’t happening…!

When done sketching, I’ll check back in (couple hours)

cheers guys small_orange_diamond

Chris

[Jason_Belec]

Sorry Atwooki, that post was for feureau, you just beat me and I was careless in not addressing it. I know you know how to fix it! You should by now! Looks cool anyway, sort representing those with disabilities.

feureau, MB is an amazing tool. I’m not too keen on the new pricing, especially as they are pushing MB as the tool to use in their new suite. I’ve been using it since it was called ‘Filmbox’ under Kaydara. It is very fast and powerful. I use it for pre-vis, updates, animation, etc., as much as possible because of flexibility. I can export a sequence to an animator using most major apps, get it back drop it in and export to Maya for output. Keeps the headache medication in the cabinet. Just understand it does not rig, it just provides motion and editing of everything in a scene, light, cameras, vfx, etc.

Liquid is actually one of the best tools available, but it is really designed for those off us handling pipelines - thank you Mr. Doncaster (spelling?). Once you realize what it can do, you never go back. That said, it will dump out any Maya scene to a Renderman API renderer directly, it just can’t interpret Maya shaders. I hear a few guys might be working on that. Instead of Maya shaders, you use Liquid structure which just links to SL shaders (Renderman). I used to use a custom app that we developed in-house and still do for very complex scenes. Everything is modular in Liquid. It is not a renderer. Those it accesses are not braking any laws, they conform to the Renderman spec. Currently non of these renderers has broken the taboo that Exluna did, legal or not. Those guys are well protected now by Nvidia and doing fine.

As for the sketch it’s a rough, and we are looking up at the ceiling from the cave floor. But it was a 10 minute sketch from some exisitng ZTLs, I’ll work on it.

[Atwooki]

OK; gone back and did some poly-edits to the feet - smoothed all levels; inflate, smooth, move, smooth etc… what the heck; if it holds up, it’ll do

That would be Mr. Gritz of whom you speak, Jason? very nice guy he is too

C.

[Jason_Belec]

Yes Atwookie and yes that looks very cool!

[feureau]

Atwooki - Seems you already got it fixed. Finished early with your sketches? When I opened the model I was like, “What the hell happened here”. It looks like some over-move that causes some zSpheres to connect to the wrong side of its parent zspheres. Particularly the pinky. And some problem with resym that blew up the mesh. As I said,I don’t have much experience with zSpheres so my tweak don’t look as good as yours. The symmetricality is lost but I got the topology right. So, please tell me what happened and how did you fix it?
Here’s what the claws looks like on mine. The rest of the mesh is untouched and unmodified. . . . this is rather embarassing.:lol:
[attach=42612]Atwooki’s.jpg[/attach]

Jason - Yeah, I heard what happened with those guys, didn’t they settled out of court or something? And eventually end up with Nvidia making Gelato. Nvidia’s Gelato renders is, well, okay, it’s not as good as a software renderer should be. I understand Liquid is like Renderman not PRman. So, do you still use it to connect to your in-house renderer or do you use open source renderers? It’s nice to have liquid ‘preconfigured’ to use with renderers like aqsis, 3Dlight. I tried liquid maya with pixie that got me that basic render I mentioned. The only thing I think is missing, is, well, that shader conversion thing.
From your description, it seems that Maya can do pretty much everything that MB does except better interoperability across different software packages. I know Maya gets FBIK from MB, is there a more advanced stuff like FBIK in MB? (That maybe would get transplanted into Maya too?)

Also, a quick bat-update. (I spent the last hour “fixing” Atwooki’s mesh)

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[Jason_Belec]

Nice update!

Well Liquid is just an exporter really. You can use any REYES renderer with it including Renderman. I used and worked with developing 3Delight years ago, great system. I use the Open Source Liquid/Pixie combo these days, and specifics will be apparent over the next few months. As for the shaders, the largest type of shaders on the web are SL. And with various tools available like Shaderman, Cutter, any text editor, it’s pretty easy. It’s the flexibility many of us prefer - total control of each and every ray of light for every surface independantly. Gelato has potential but it requires graphic cards, which just doesn’t work for me. I’ve been working development for years and can whup those renders with small systems called BriQs and a process that has proven itself over and over. I heard a lot of talk about how the graphic card renderer was going to take over, but the heat issue alone has not been overcome. Someday, maybe it will come along. Playing with cutting edge toys these days, they should make a big splash in a few months.

Maya has been integrating with MB for some time now. It is improved, but I still find Maya a pain and lethargic. I can do it in MB in a fraction of the time and with a far less powerful system. But everyone works a little differently and with different goals. MB just allows me to work with more people around the world with fewer issues. The think bothering many of us is Autodesk trying to tie Max/Maya/MB together, raising the prices and pushing them as integrated package. Well - crap, with little or no real improvements its a cash grab. But what ya gonna do?

Oh well, time for some sleep…

[Atwooki]

Hi guys

Feureau - thanks for putting in the time on my guys feet; all a bit of a mess, eh :lol:
Still; snatched some time today to do some further leg-work, and will carry on shortly…

cheers

Chris

[feureau]

Atwooki - Yeah, sorry I couldn’t do a better job, though. I don’t use zSpheres very often. Always seems to get the same issue on your model’s foot, like the zspheres would twist and attach itself on the wrong faces. Although, I must say I rarely get mesh blowout like that due to zSpheres. The unsymmetric rotation you mentioned is reproducible on my machine and it’s the same on my bat. But the rotation is reversed from the left to the right side of my model. It’s unsymmetrical only if the zspheres aren’t symmetrcial. I think this is normal behavior with zspheres… though…

Jason - I’ve heard of render boxes with a bunch of GPUs on them. Is that the toys you’re talking about? And, on BriQs, is this renderman compliant? Hardwares like that Sun servers that’s made of mainstream hardwares? (Or is it one of them signed secrecy thing?)

I tried Liquid with 3Delight, Aqsis and Pixie. I didn’t know you were 3Delight developer. Cool! Shaderman lost me. There hasn’t been any tutorials on zbrush-maya-liquid-open source REYES workflows around. (preferably pixie?) I looked for this topic couple of months ago to no avail. Maybe one day you can make a tutorial on this technique? I believe many of us would really appreciate it.

Open source is really the way to go. Have you seen Elephant’s Dream? Although the animation is pretty amateurish, it’s amazing what you can achieve with free stuff lately.

I’m not sure what’s up with autodesk snatching up maya and max. Although they said would separate the two development team, I think eventually the two would be merged. Currently, the integration between the three (maya/max/MB) seems to be pretty bad with FBX. I heard max exports/imports FBX quickly while (at least on my box) maya takes a while to import FBX scenes. Maybe one day when they’re all in one package.

uh oh. . . getting even more OT. I hope it’s okay with everyone. :lol: This thread is gold. Once again, thank you Jason for everything.

[Atwooki]

Hi feureau - that’s a mad nose on your bat, btw! nice work…

By the way; by mess earlier, I was referring to the screwy ziffs (aPC transferal ailment I guess) !!

As a thought… here a simple ZTL to show my general foot-setup:

Chris