wow…for someone with your artistic talents to call anything i’ve put out their fascinating boggles my simple mind 
… if u ever do some experimenting with the retopo mode for landscape creation let me know… we can swap ideas. im actually planning on trying to make a helmet from scratch using a combo of topology tools and some top mod ideas i wanna try to make after seeing what you did with it… will definitely see how much of a match the two ideas are
hehehe!!!
Thanks but its not talent, its a fetish for buttons and finding out what they do, you should see me in an elevator, I’m wildly unpopular.
What you did for that snow tubing thing is awesome, seriously, I have been trying to follow the instructions but its still a bit beyond MY simple mind.
My biggest problem with using Zsphere retopo is that once I start building up a fair amount of mesh I cant tell what Im working on cause i can only see the wireframe and doing a preview just to try to guess which point I’m working on every second or so gets tedious… I think I’m missing something like “hide back faces” or some feature like that but then I haven’t looked too hard either. I am making progress however and while I keep getting lost and poking those anoying holes in my mesh its a lot of fun, so far I have two hills and a field… more on that as soon as I figure out how far I can push it. Building landscapes or anything else like that from scratch is like subdividing by hand.
Huge landscapes in Zbrush seem to be a bit hard on my computer, this is 4.1 million polygons done with the ProjectionMaster:
And another thingy from TopMod:
And another, not what I was expecting:
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That last one is TopMod, then Sculptris for replication and then GoZ into Zbrush for insanity and color and lots more polygons…
I see you’re making wonders with Topmod 
Can’t wait to see the next one !
Just one thing, please put the Background Gradient Range slider to 0. Well perhaps it’s just my personal taste… 
Mealea - yeah using the topology when you get past a certain number of points can be a headache in the waiting. the best i could suggest is try using it to set up you primary landscape points, ie, mountain peaks, valley lines, plateaus, etc… then dump it to a polymesh just to have a copy in case the detail pass gets wonky.
for detail pass the trick to keeping track of what you’re doing is to use clipping mask… when your in edit topology mode and you have draw enabled, cntrll+shift and select a only the area that contains the part you wish to detail. clipping in topology mode is a little wonky and it will undoubtedly contain some extra points and edges that arent part of the area you’re looking to detail but you will at least have a lot less in the way to confuse you. Use the detail pass just to set up areas that you want to displace further or add sculpting detail to. If you keep the number of points relatively low then when you drop it to a polymesh you can turn on wireframe and start point modeling.
Small example… Say you’re laying out a mountain range/valley with a volcano peak somewhere in the middle. start out using the simple cube… box out your basic peaks valleys and plateaus… change your select tool to marquee and with wireframe on point by point select the points you wish to transpose at the same time… invert selection and use your transpose tools to move everything to proper heights/depths etc. bring the model back into topo to layout more points for further detail… in this case lets say for the volcano top you start with one of the mountain peaks to turn into a volcano… near the top you want to add 3 concentric rings of points around the top 1/4 of the peak. bring it back into a polymesh and again using the marquee mask, select the peak and 2 of the concentric rings… inverse… transpose it straight down. so that the lower of the 2 rings you selected is now parellel to the ring below it that you hadnt selected. deselect everything… select the top ring and peak… inverse… transpose straight down until the ring is below the 2 other rings giving you the volcano crater slope… deselect all… select just the peak point… inverse …transpose straight down until even with the crater floor.
you now got a volcano peak with topology already laid out for you for further detailing after you divide on it.
hopefully i’m making sense and this helps you get how im utilizing the topo mode. it seems time consuming and is probably easier to use 3ds max (if you have max and have the patience to learn it) … but when you get the hang of what topology edit mode can do… and you understand how to make the transpose tools work with moving individual points or small groups of points… you can power through seeting up your basic landscape pretty dang quick. then hopefully by the time you get the model to a point where you’re adding in the extreme levels of detail, you wont need ridiculous numbers of polys to pull off the same level of details you’ve done using projection master.
i think today im gonna try making a bridge using just topo mode and a simple cube… just to see what i can get from it. 
@Arnomad:
GRIN!!! I love that thing, its gotten very interesting and has more to it than I first thought, also something you said got me screwing about in black and white which has been great fun, more below, oh and thank you very much! (again!)
@Dapharmer:
That is so odd you said that… I accidentally made just that, a volcano… and a landscape around it, it got to the point where I could not see what I was doing and then I crashed Zbrush some how, that little incident however led to something new, you know how in retopo you can use symmetry on things like a body or face or what ever? well try this:
- Make single Zsphere.
- Hit the ^%$@^#$-ing EDIT button!!!!!!!
- Enter retopo mode.
- Turn on symmetry in the transform menu and use X Y and Z.
- Turn on MIRROR. (on by default I think)
- Turn on RADIAL (I have it at 8).
- Zoom in and make a couple of polygons. (only a couple at first)
- Hit A on the keyboard and wait a while. (it is a bit much)
Here is an example of that after going insane with it:
Back to sculpting for a change of pace:
Topmod fun:
And another:
And still another:
BUT WAIT!!! Theres MORE!!!
Cheers!
Mealea
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hehe awesome man… i will have to play with that… i had decided to go back into the sculpting hard myself too…
and i apoligize for being shameless self promoter but gotta point ya to my new render to check out http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?p=882290#post882290 very very proud of it and be honored to get an opinion of a crazy artist like you.
Thank you again McTeaPot! You got me looking at new stuff!
Well…
It looks like even though I sort of can make a movie now I have a few problems:
It will only run in Zbrush.
Its too big to upload.
Even if I could upload it ZBC has size limits and this is WAY over.
So…
That puts that on hold for a bit I suppose…
The thing is that watching a time lapse of making a sculpt was rather educational, I did this because Poda includes a video with each of his(?) sculpts and I think they are terrific so I tried it out and it was great.
See Poda’s work here, its awesome:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=76663&page=1&pp=15
Now I have to figure out how to get it from .ZMV on my computer to some other format and onto the bloody internet. Curse bandwidth limits and the people who invented them.
Anyhow I did three things using time lapse, they are more interesting as video I think.
One of these days I’m going to try doing something like sleeping… or not.
there’s an option under movei to export the file and you should be able to save it as a .mov from there … the zmv file just saves the frames and settings the movie itself doesnt render until you export it.
@Dapharmer:
heh…
Thanks, I know about that but I don’t want quicktime, its one of those things that demands constant updating and tries to sneak crap I don’t want into my computer, most of which is impossible to ever get rid of… adobe does the same stuff, its infuriating.
Anyhow you cant export a .mov with out quicktime and I am not letting apple into my computer. (I only have 4gb of ram, and Im keeping as much of it as I can for stuff like Zbrush)
Thanks for that anyway though!
Cheers!
Mealea
if i can find it on my comp i’ll get you a workaround that will let you export the qt without the need for installing qt… theres an old plugin for mediaplayer classic called qtalt … lets you view your qt mov files in mpc with 0 problems and you never need a qt update.
if from that point you want to convert to a dfferent format you should…should… be able to use virtualdub … its free… relatively easy to figure out… and works at leats 50% of the time
either way i’ll look for the files on my machine when i get a chance tomorrow during the day and will send a link to you in a pm if i can find them. unfortunately as far as i can tell there arent any additional option for exporting and the zbrush movie format definitely cant be converted… yet… hopefully with the next update maybe there will be some better format compatibility with the movies cause noone likes quicktime anymore. yeah it allows for smallish files and extremely quick processing when uploading it to youtube… but still… it’s quicktime… :\
Let’s make it clear, QT, (.mov files) is a carrier, not a code. As .avi is. It’s the compression encoding that counts in the end, it can be an mpeg4 or anything.
QT is fine. For windows users, download VLC. The best player around for all OSs. You don’t know VLC? Shame on you LOL. Watch QT on full screen, there’s some quality on this format.
http://www.videolan.org/
@Dapharmer:
I’m looking that up now, Thanks!
@Michalis:
hehehe!
Shame on me indeed, I had never heard of it!
Oh my god this does amazing things with my crappy little speakers…
However I still cant figure out how to export video from Zbrush… maybe after setting windows to send .mov to VLC by defaultI need to tell Zbrush the same thing? If so, how?
This is a cool player though, now I’m trying to find the editor the site talks about, that looks good too.
Poke prod twiddle!!!
hehehe…
Im so tired I can hardly see.
Sculptris rendered in Zbrush
And a 3 legged Goat thingy Im working on:
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ZBC is not working correctly lately… it needs a poke in the php.
Love those abstracts posted on the previous page in here…
Maybe try a different material just for the fun of it…Maybe something that resembles crystal…They remind me of fantastic geodes…Just a passing thought that may be useful to you somewhere along your journy…
Thanks Spirit Dreamer, I should do that I suppose but I sort of cannot seem to make things transparent, reflective or any thing like that. That and if I still have those objects I havent a clue where or what I named them…
They are like this thing just a scribble to see what happens:
Attachments
crap… thats frigging huge…
—ignore that, I fixed it now its tiny.
haha yeah smidge on the large side, make an alpha of that and sculpt some sort or crazy crab bug! seriously, keep at it edit: ah beat me to it
@Dman:
hehehehe… that was an alpha as a mater of fact!
I fixed it with somewhat more reasonable sized ones.
GRIN!!!