Hey buddy,wassup?? How you doin’ these days??? 
not sure what’s wrong with ZBSee but I can’t see your work from the main page.but anyway, this is coming along nicely.she looks HOT.great choice on her clothes.those gloves are my favorite.
PS: Frackles backstory was just great.more believable & much more interesting.I bet if you put more time into Nastya’s as well you can make it awesome too.BTW I was thinking about what you said about Antaeus & how two parts of his brain will act.kinda reminds me of Ishi from Bulletstorm.part of his brain was damaged & his teammates had to replace it with robot’s bioprocessor.& after that he changed.he was in a constant war for control with the AI inside him.most of the time he was normal but sometimes those augs took control of his brain,leading to violence against his friends.pretty sure Antaeus will be the best character if you put enough time into his story (& his brain hehe:D ).but again,glad to see your work.keep rocking my friend.;)
Hi!! I’m OK more or less. I’m glad that you like it. I thought to fill this post with more images (full turntable, backpack, underwear and other ammunition), but they are still should be polished more and right now I have no energy at all. Gonna rest for some days or sculpt something different for relaxation.
Also glad to hear that you like her gloves. I’m a big fan of long gloves but in this case the decision to add them was totally spontaneous. So I modeled them in last day so they aren’t detailed yet.
Yes, I was surprised when I realized that second main character Flora got more comprehensive backstory than Nastya. Now I definitely should rework Nastya’s bio. It is a bit hard to balance between making very simple writings just to give a basic idea about characters and more detailed plot. Right now I’m writing some dialogues to reveal their inner worlds but I’m really afraid that I’m going overboard.
Yeah, I remember Ishi :). It is really cool character. But his appearance was so disturbing that I never trusted him during the whole game.
Thanks again for your comment. It means a lot for me. Good to know that someone is interested in story I do.
Decided to post an old render of Antaeus body. Right now have no energy to continue with it but I hope to come back to it soon. Some parts are still just a rough sketch from Zbrush (chest and back), while others have more or less good topology but still not finished and not detailed.
The main intent is to show a robot in the middle of modification process from mechanic to organic. He started modifying his body to resemble more a human being, but as he admit later most of fleshy parts are purely aesthetic and not functional (hence his internals are still filled with wires, hydraulics etc)
Stylized female body. Really like playing with proportions. It would be a fan-art. In original drawing due to extreme pose it is very hard to judge about the breast shape and proportions overall. So I will do a lot of fixes later after posing. Probably it would be easier to start with asymmetric sculpting but… whatever.
Everything is super WIP. Posting it because… well, just to show that I’m still alive.
Cheers everyone.
Hi everyone! What’s happened to ZBC? It looks abandoned. Well, maybe that’s due to the holidays…
OMG, after so many months of sculpting this character (I believe the body was made a year ago), and not even finishing the model I finally deigned to paint her.
Here are just a basic skin tones to see how she looks like with color. She is supposed to be brunette or brown haired girl, but I could not resist to add some freckles (jeez, I love them). The eyes are temporary and color-corrected in PS. I did some other tweaks as a postprocess so she looks a bit too saturated. She also had a bit blushing cheeks but during the painting the redness fade away so I would reintroduce it again.
Overall her skin should be darker than Flora’s cause Nastya was an inhabitant of the inferior world and was often working under the sun (not calling her redneck but you get my point). And opposite to Anastasia Flora is a real couch potato so she has an aristocratic paleness. I’m not sure but I might create two versions of Nastya: one with regular skin as on the image and another one very sun-tanned with distinct bikini tan-lines (that’s another big fetish). After all she was wandering for several months during the hot summer. The sweaty shiny skin also looks better when it is tanned.
And here is a test render of Flora’s hair. She was originally planned as a redhead.
Hey! That is some great hair and shader! How is the import into blender? Can it import the obj with Fibermesh curves directly?
Would you mind showing your workflow a littlebit. Never used Blenders Cycles but seems that this is a fantastic renderer.
Used blender most time as converter.
Hi and thanks for a kind words!
No, unfortunately Blender is badly integrated with Zbrush and there is no direct import of Fibermesh into it. I searched a proper way to do that for a long time and the only solution I found is the small add-on called Hair-Net . But it is really buggy and I don’t use it anymore. But to give you a rough idea about the workflow I will describe it anyways so you can decide whether is it worth or not to try it.
Basically you export Fibermesh curves as an OBJ file into Blender. You should export only percentage of hair guides (using PreVis slider in Zbrush) otherwise Blender will crash.
- It will appear as a mesh without thickness - just a bunch of verts and edges.
- Then you convert it into a curve (by pressing Alt+C in object mode).
- I often get problems with scale after growing hair so make sure to apply your location, rotation and scale (Ctrl+A). Maybe apply it twice after exporting and after converting - this will not hurt.
- So right now it sounds simple, huh? Here is a stage when problem occur. Ideally you select your scalp, then shift+select a guides (or vice versa, I don’t remember), click “Create hair” in Add-on’s tab and here you go. In reality it often gives you an error and the chances you got it is totally random. The only pattern I found is that it grows hair better on recently separated group of guides. To explain it better: you have a big amount of curves inside one object. Then you select part of them (lets say one fourth) and separate them into another object by pressing “P” shortcut. So now you get two groups of curves and the add-on most likely will grow a hair from a small group but will give you an error if you try growing from the big one. So if you managed to grow the first fourth of your hair, you then go to main group of curves and separate yet another fourth. It appears that the number of curves in object doesn’t really cause an error. Of course it can freeze with too many curves, but that’s another problem.
- Once you got all your hair grown you can play with Children strands. While in Zbrush every hair strand is unique object, in Blender most of the hair is created by Children following the main guides.
- Also, each time after growing a hair you should switch to particle editing mode and wiggle a hair just a bit with comb brush. Otherwise Blender might reset your hairstyle.
And there is another problem. Just recently I was checking my previous working files and I found that one of my hairstyles was reset as it was described in paragraph above. I have no idea what was the reason for it (switching to different version of Blender, changing file location or simply due to the buggy add-on). But be prepared that it will force you to redo the process of growing again. But that was the main reason why I don’t use it anymore. In fact, the hairstyle you see above was created totally in Blender and not in Zbrush. Blender also has styling tools but the process is more tedious compare to Zbrush. A bit awkward brushes, not very good display of hair so it appears messy in viewport, but surprisingly much better control over selections (far easier than polygroupping or masking).
So that’s it. I hope it was useful and will help you to decide is it worth to use Cycles inside Blender for hairy stuff
Thanks a lot for your explaining your workflow.
Yes it seems like a lot of try and error to get curves from Zbrush.
It seems that blender cycles will cause much more trouble,
because i need to learn it from scratch.
Can not wait to see more from you.
cheers,
Christian
Thank you!
Actually, the whole Blender and its Cycles are very intuitive and straightforward softwares. I also heard that Cycles was made with Arnold renderer in mind so there should be a lot of similarities. Plus you can download a lot of good shaders made by community if you don’t want to learn it.
In case of hair the problem is mainly due to the third-party add-on which initial purpose was a bit different (to grow particle hair from hair-cards). The workflow described above was only my personal observation. I bet if more people will ask for good exporter then developers will make it. But it seems like people don’t care and simply create hairstyles in Blender.
BTW I’m not sure but I heard that another good option for hair might be a Vector Displacement. Though again officially Blender isn’t supporting it now 
.
Hey Anton,Wassup buddy?? Happy 2016.Glad to see your work again.That hair came out pretty darn great.& also nice job on the polypainting the face.Maybe add a bit of color variation to her lips.Keep’em coming.;)
Hello and Glad to see you!
Yeah, that’s all just a test renders, they are by no means finished yet. I realized that it is hard to write a story while the final look of the characters are still so vague. So I decided to add at least some color to see how Nastya looks with it. It is a shame that I still didn’t finish the sculpt (I was too caught by making clothes, accessories and other side projects). The hair for Flora is still should be refined more. Jeez, it takes so much time to render so many strands that my PC is barely breathing. Right now making hairstyles for Nastya.
Thank you and would be glad to see updates from you as well.
More hair for the God of Hair! Color is temporary. Just like the combination of orange and white
homem muito legal cabelo
Fantastic Update!
Very good render indeed, and thanks for explaining your workflow with Cycles and the problems you met.
I am also getting my feet wet in Blender, and I love. It feels much more intuitive to me than what I used before. If the GoB bridge does not work, it may well be because Blender itself changes often on a deeper level.
I love Cycles and see its potential, but it still has na number of gaps that make it more a project than a final render engine. Things like vector displacement maps, sub-polygon displacement,… are really missing.
So I just recently installed Renderman for Blender. It is free for non-commercial work and integrates flawlessly with Blender. And it offers that which Cycles cannot do yet. I consider it Cycles’ big brother, and it is not that difficult on a basic level.
It does not give us a GoB, but it has really nice shaders and is really great for displacements. I suppose it might fit into your workflow.
In case you would be interested, one detail: after getting an account at Renderman’s forums, downloading and beginning to install R, you will see a window that says something like ‘there is no Maya installed, and using R in standalone mode is meant for experts.’ Never mind and continue the install. Open Blender, install and activate the bridge in Prefs and there you go.
Only a suggestion of course.
Once again: superb hair, good work overall, and keep on being inspired. And I agree on the tanlines.
fantastic hair
Jhon_Erick, ChrRambow, Abdelrahman
Thanks a lot, guys! I’m really glad that you like the hair.
Erik Heyninck
Thank you! Yes, Blender and Cycles are great. And as you said very intuitive. Even when I explore completely new topic like rigging or some kind of simulations it is often so straightforward that I don’t even need to watch tutorials or read the docs. But indeed Blender is missing some things that are already world standards. And its way of tesselating meshes for displacement really disturbs me. It just goes with brute force subdividing everything instead of partially dividing mesh where needed.
I will definitely check the Renderman. It would be cool to play with it. I heard that it was ported for Blender along with basic support for OpenSubdiv but never really tried it. Probably because my PC is so old and I was afraid that it will not handle the Renderman. Even this hair test took me more than two hours to render.
Tan lines rule It is amazing how simple lines can add a lot of story and character. Now I should find a good way to implement this alternative texture and avoid technical restrictions. I am making a lot of layers for facial expressions and breast behavior (to react on different clothes), but because of heavy polygon count I am forced to separate the head which breaks UVs and creates other problems.
Thanks again for the kind words. It is good to see that stuff I do means something to others.
Just having fun. Love her lips. Pores are still crappy though.
Those lips are looking good. But, maybe you could emphasize the “ridge” of the lower lip just a tad more, as it’s described in this image. Because it’s more like a flat plane compared to the “bump” area of the lower lip:
http://i.imgur.com/g97yww4.jpg
But I like how the crease fades out from both sides when meeting on the center of the lower lip.
Hello and thank you!
It is funny because just yesterday I was giving suggestions to one person here and I recommended him to soften this ridge and I also posted the same diagram :lol:. Personally I don’t like when the entire mouth is encircled with this ridge. I like to blend it on the sides of the lower lip with the outer portion of orbicularis oris (according to Eliot Goldfinger this fleshy portions are called the Pillars of the mouth).