ZBrushCentral

How to render AO for animation [Answered]

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey there!

I have this little issue… I am pretty much doing what mister Steve Warner did in his “Creating A Better Demo Reel With ZBrush 4”. Now… in his video he is doing the AO pass animation by using the flat shade material… Which it appears to not be possible anymore.

What he did was to fill that material, turn on AO and do a BPR… this would display the AO properly on the model. However, if I do that now, all I can see is a flat white object with the edges smoothed after the render… but no AO…

Does anyone know a solution to this? I have tried SkinShade04 but it doesn’t really show what I need… It pretty much does what all the other mats are doing which is to retain quite a lot of the general look instead of washing away and leaving only the AO…

If anyone know a solution please help me out because I need to finish my portfolio in the next few days and I really need this piece of information!

Thank you very much for your time!

Regards!

#2

Check your BPR Passes to see if the AO pass still showed up there. If it did, you can always export it and composite it in another program

#3

That’s a still image mate! I need to render an animation only with AO…
Thanks anyway for the reply! :slight_smile:

#4

Unfortunately it’s not possible to export the AO images using the Timeline or Movie>Turntable. However, you can use the Turntable Plus plugin. The 4R3 version is a little clunky in 4R5 (I plan to update as soon as I can) but it will do what you want for turntable-type animation. See here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?94752-Useful-small-ZScripts-and-Macros-for-ZBrush-4-amp-4R3&p=759928&viewfull=1#post759928

#5

Could you not also:

Mask by AO invert the mask and fill with black color then clear the mask.
Change the material to Flat Color and the background to pure white.
Then make the movie and export.

#6

Thanks Marcus! I will check that out and hopefully I will manage to do what I need!

Also thanks, DLangley, I kinda tried the masking by AO thingy and it works… kinda… I tried it briefly yesterday and I suppose I need to play with the settings more to get to the result I want.

Thank you both for your help… Does anyone know why exactly that old way with the Flat Mat won’t work anymore? What was changed?

#7

Sorry, I thought you were aiming to composite the result. Even for longer animations, doing it manually by hand would only taken a few extra minutes tops (which can be much quicker than waiting hours and days to find out why old features are broken).

But having put the extra time to use; if you only want a movie, I’m guessing you can probably get away with using a BPR filter. Set the document to a pute white color, load up a paint filter, set it’s blending to multiply, use a dark color (also increase the color strength if need be), and set the mask to AO 1). I believe that will show up in your main pass when rendering a movie, even with a flatcolor material.

#8

Thanks for the suggestions!
At the moment I’m finishing/polishing my scenes and in a few days I’ll get to render and composite animations in AE. I’ll post in here what I’ve done!
Thanks again and let me know if you get other ideas!

Cheers!

Dan

#9

Hey guys! Right… So I’m kinda done with polishing and stuff so I want to start rendering the passes.

I have tried both versions and none of them work for different reasons. Here is a short story version after I tried all sort of things for the past hour and a half:

TurnTablePlus problem:

  • First of all I’m not sure if I am using it as it should be used. What I did was to set my char at distance, press Start button, zoomed till top half torso, pressed Mid, than rotated and pushed Stop. I activated “Best Preview Render” and clicked only on AO since I wanted to do a fast test. First it asks me the thing about rotate (keep or not local), than I get a dialog about the image format (it seems psd is the only kind available) and than it directs me to tell him a location to save. I set the folder and I change the last “0” from the img title into “1” and press ok. This is when I get this error: “Unable to save file” and it gives me the location of TurnTablePlus addon.
    Here is an image with the error: TurnTablePlus_Error.jpg

The issues I had with doing it manual:

Well… There is no issue because I understand the idea behind it. BUT
Just to make sure, I have a few questions:

1- I need to have my model in one subtool, right?
2- I need to have it bellow 3-4 mil if I don’t want to wait literally hours, right? I tried one time on a 9 mil poly model and estimated time was at about 400+ minutes… -_-

Thanks and I really really hope that you guys can answer me soon because this is kinda holding me still… Thanks a lot!

Cheers!

Dan

#10

The most likely reason for the error message is that you haven’t installed the plugin correctly. Make sure that the TurntablePlus_4R3.zsc and the TurntablePlusData4 folder are directly in the ZStartup/ZPlugs folder.

For the operation, the Start, Mid and Stop buttons store the model’s position and scale. If all you want is a turntable then press the Start and Stop button without moving the model, ignoring the Mid position. The Mid button acts as a modifier a bit like a magnet, so that if (for example) your Start position was the top left of the canvas and the Stop position was bottom right, then putting the Mid position in the top right corner would create a curved path for the animation whereas without the Mid button it would simply be a straight path between Start and Stop.

The plugin works with any number of subtools and it shouldn’t matter too much how many polygons your model has. What will affect the time it takes will be the BPR render settings - it may be that for rendering AO it is better not to have too many polygons, I don’t know.

#11

Thanks for the quick reply, man!

There seems to be a problem with the archive… It has no folder, only the .zsc file. Sorry for being such a pest but I can’t find another place from where to download it… So I was wondering if you are aware of this…

Thanks again and sorry for being such a noob!

ps: Is there a way to define the animation in the timeline and than link that animation to the plugin?

Cheers!

Dan

#12

Apologies, I should have checked that; here’s the full plugin.

Download here:

Unfortunately there’s no way to link the plugin or export an image sequence using the Timeline. :frowning: