Good Day ZBrushers,
I am curious to know if it is possible, or if someone has already created a matcap that mimics the optical properties of a star sapphire? I will attach a sample image. Thank you.
- JBRo
I haven’t the faintest idea of how to simulate the actual optics that cause a star sapphire to look like a star sapphire but I do know how to make a matcap out of your photo… (poorly)
This is sort of bad cause I need a better image editor or more time… possibly both but its actually not horrible (thanks to Pixologic being smart as heck!)…
I recommend turning “wax preview” on, it seems to help.
This question of yours got me thinking about rendering, matcaps and various other things and I think ZBrush is actually capable if not able to mimic perfectly the properties of things like this, the trick I think is that they reflect their backgrounds and that is where the work starts, I think instead of doing just a mat cap a lightcap would be the thing to use but that will take me some time and I haven’t got much of that lately.
Anyhow I hope this is useful in the mean time:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/76310757/ZbrushStuff/MineFrigginMatCaps/StarSaphire-UseWaxPreview.zip
Cheers!
Mealea
Thank you very much. I appreciate the help. I actually have been trying different things as well. It seems I picked a pretty difficult thing to simulate. I suspect, that if the surface becomes irregular, the star that forms will form at the apex of each smooth surface… thereby making most PC’s melt… lol
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, and even try to make one!
Thanks again!
You are very welcome!
I am curious about this as well, things like tigers eye, tourmaline and others have some very interesting structures inside them. I am working on this still but while doing something very (foolishly) large in Blender the other day I did something bad to my hard drive and cant start my computer at the moment (I think I generated more files than it can hold…).
I was using a program called MaCrea and having terrific luck trying to get a star sapphire out of it, I just can’t get at it at the moment.
Macrea is available here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?92157-MaCrea-Material-Creation-Tool&p=722506&viewfull=1#post722506
Its SUPER easy to use and a LOT of fun as well, it makes things that work flawlessly in ZBrush and Sculptris which is delightful and the guy who made it Taron is splendid.
What I was doing initially before my nasty little crash was making 4-5 lights and then screwing with how they affect surface and subsurface, The surface I made blue, then use subsurface to make the lights into rings which I shoved off into the corners to form the star… I left the lights white, the surface I tried various shades of blue and the subsurface I screwed about with other colors but very light, it was going well and with some messing about you could do some seriously cool stuff.
Try out MaCrea, its terrific, and I would love to see what you come up with!
Cheers!
Mealea