Personal Zbrush improvement thread

JamesLarden

Hey PolyCount, i'll be posting whatever Zbrush practice stuff I do here, I really appreciate any feedback and critique you guys give me.

My first ever Zbrush sculpt (a wooden plank I plan to use for a barrel):

JamesLarden

Update, first wood plank crashed while I was trying to export it. Decided to make a new one and i'm more happy with it than my first result, again any feedback appreciated.

JamesLarden

Another update, i'm in the process of trying to sculpt a barrel. I want it to look fairly stylized and was hoping i'd be able to achieve the same look I did in the 2nd picture I posted to this thread, however I got kind of lost along the way.



My biggest annoyance is that I can't get the edge wear right on the crevices between each plank, my plan was to carve out the lines and then flatten the edges to make them look worn, but I think I made them a bit too shallow and small width ways so when I tried to flatten the edges it was producing really ugly results.

Any advice is appreciated, I think what would help me most is if someone would be kind enough to share how the would go about sculpting a barrel in Zbrush. (Normally I don't think I would spend this much time on just a barrel, but it's for a college unit)

Also I am getting these weird black shadows on the normal map:




My first thought was that I needed to add more sections to the low poly barrel because there's a huge waste of space between the smooth metal ring of the high poly and the harder edge of the low poly. (Picture: ) Any help on this issue is also greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.