new tutorial..zbrush & max..

arshlevon

i am really liking zbrushs ability to detail meshes.. i find it faster than using photoshop and less of a pain in the ass to go back and forth between photoshop and engine or back to max to see if your overlay setting are right.in zbrush you know EXACTLY what the final normal map is going to look like and painting pores and details like wrinkles is super easy (thats why everyone on the zbrush forums covers everything in useless detail).. but there are some people that think its a waste of time to detail your meshes in zbrush because you cant get the model into max.. well they are wrong.. here is a another horribly compressed vid tutorial..
GETTING HUGE MESHES FROM ZBRUSH TO MAX
this ones compression is really bad.. but i checked it out.. and everytime i click on a button or rollout that area is clear and i think if you watch it you will understand everything that is going on without a problem..

hope you like!!!

KMan

Nice info there, too bad about the compression. That cage tool is pretty cool sounding, now that I know what it does. :S

Now I just need to have a reason to take my zbrushings into max for normal mapping.

-=Warhead=-

I think his nose is to small, But nice job

Rhinokey

nice, i missed $.50 in that last vid.. and i'm curious about the croc hunter psd i saw.. what was that?

arshlevon

he was going to be the special guest in this one.. but the file was getting so big by the time i compressed it he was unreconizable.. so he got cut.. i might just up the intro if you want to see it..i am trying to keep all the files under 10 megs for bandwidth reasons..

Keg

nice, somewhat useful for those without max.

Keg

little addition is within zbrush under preferences if you go to import/export options and select normalmapflipy and normalmapflipvert you can save yourself doing those items within photoshop or your 3d program.

ewooz

Thanks for sharing that tutorial arshlevon. I didn't know about the flipping of the green channel, it doesn't say in the Zbrush practical guide. And that orc looks really cool. Did you model it from scratch in Zb or did u do the base mesh in Max first?

arshlevon

thanks for the tip keg..

ewooz: yeah the reason you have to invert the green channel is because i flipped the map.. when you render a normal map each channel represents a direction in space.. if you flip or rotate the map, then your normals are now going in diferent directions and you will have to do some channel inverting to compensate...

Sean McBride

Cool stuff arsh. thanks for that.

rawkstar

omg fuck that I just import it all in max and it spins around in real time I got 16 gigs of ram.

I WISH

lol nah seriously though I just import it all in max, and it tends to actually work, I do it in parts ofcourse and in the end I get like a 5-10mil poly mesh, but oh well as long as its not all showing at the same time ur good, and then I just render the normal map in melody in pieces (which is how u'd do it anyway. then set all ur pieces to display as boxes unhide all and make a pimp highpoly render

both machines I've done this on have 2+ gigs of ram though. max ends up using 1-1.5 gigs while just working with these meshes.

arshlevon

this usually speeds up the process more than 100% for me.. if i try to render a normal and ambient occlusion map for a 5 million poly model i am looking at a good 15-20 mins of rendering time.. when i get the exact same result doing it this way and the normal and AO map rendered 30 seconds.. and i could have all of any pieces of my mesh in the viewport at once, seperate into differnt matID and bake all my maps at one time in less than 2 mins.. i hate baking things seperatly when its just as easy to do it all in one go..

demoncage

Isn't it kind of restrictive using zbrush for normal maps though? Not in terms of processing speed but just modeling work flow. Like wouldn't you have to start with your "game-ready" mesh as division level 1 in zbrush and not deviate too much from that basic form with the high poly? In other words you couldn't do your highpoly in zbrush, trace a game mesh around that in max and get your uvs, then sub in the new low poly for division level 1 in zbrush cause it would mess everything up. For game art, i think rockstar's method is more appropriate but I guess it all depends on what you would be using this for.

Cool model by the way.

arshlevon

you can start with anymesh you want.. the point of the tutorial is not making a normal map for a realtime model.. its getting a mesh into max to bake normal maps off of.. so after the tutorial you go an make a low poly model and use the model from zbrush to bake with..the results will exactly the same as bringing in the 2.5 million poly model ...only you will be bringing in a 15,000 poly model instead..

demoncage

I didn't watch the tutorial, sorry for my laziness. Guess I misinterpreted rockstar's post to indicate that you were using zbursh for generating final normal maps. I'll give your vid a watch, thanks.

CMB

That will realy help when I'm getting zbrush(soon...)
But could you make the video higher qaulity?

rawkstar

yeah max is slow thats why I use melody, goes alot alot faster than max and a hell of a lot easier workflow too. i usually render things separately when pieces clip through each other and they have to move when its all animated.

MoP

Arsh: Good stuff, I downloaded it, but the codec quality really isn't good enough, I think...

mr_Rockstar: Any chance you could do a tutorial on using Melody with Max? I tried the latest version and it just totally refused to render a normal-map, I'm pretty sure I did everything right!

rawkstar

i'll make it. I personally prefer the old version where u didn't have to restart the app to render another piece, so I could basically batch it all, I made a tutorial for my coworkers, but that was for the old version I'll post it online.

Sean McBride

Speeking of melody, i installed the dds file reader for photoshop that came with melody... and it refuses to work at all. There isnt a way to save the normal maps in any other format is there?

Lee3dee

good tutorial arshlevon shame about the using windows media. If you have a larger file, I could try and convert it into mpeg and see how that looks

Mongrelman

Melody 1.2 can render the maps as tga files, it's in the normal map settings in the section where you can choose to render object/tangent space, displacement map, colour map etc.

poopinmymouth

Awesome tutorial man. I think the compression is fine, I could see everything you clicked.

One quick thing. Instead of bumping up your normal from 1.0 to 1.8, you should have first made the bump map 100%, as the default is 30, and you left it like that. So it was only giving you 30% which is why you had to bump it up. I prefer doing it at the map level first, as that puts it back to 100% accuracy from zbrush.

Keep em coming man!

arshlevon

thanks dudes.. rockstar i will have to give melody a try..

@poop... the normal bump map dosent use that value at all.. i tryed it out..you can even change the number to 0 and it will yield the same results as 100 when you render.. only that normal value of 1.0 changes the intensity.. give her a try.. its weird that works like that..

Sean McBride

it does effect the viewport when you turn on DX. Maybe thats what you are thinking about poop?

poopinmymouth

yup, n30 hit it. I haven't rendered them yet, so that's good to know ARsh. looks like we were BOTH right. 8-)

Weiser_Cain

Audio is annoying so far, is there a way to view these with 6.4 media player? I'd rather not upgrade.

arshlevon

try media player classic.. its a really small file..less than a meg and it playes everything..

sorry i am so annoying next time i will hire james earl jones to recite everything..

Weiser_Cain

Well I'm not sure who's annoying as I can see nothing(sounds like two people?). I use media player as it comes with windows install I just rather not update to evil spy/bloat/macware. My loss I guess(from what I can hear) but in the future try to make it a mpeg(?) as I've never had trouble opening those.
I'm still reccomending this so don't feel bad, I appreciate you effort.

dom

arshlevon, try out these settings and see if they work:
video: 25fps, keyframe every 400frames, better compression
audio: interleave every 1 sec, PCM (data rate as low as possible depending on how much quality you wanna compromise)

Under Capture settings: toggle on/off disable hardware acceleration during capture. My system works better with it off and Im on win2k. Give this a go, it should make a difference.

And thanks for the vids.

arshlevon

you should really try media player classic.. it is media player 6.4 only upgraded to work on all current formats.. you can even download a plugin to view realplayer files..also playes dvds really good..
and there is nothing to install.. its just an exe

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=84358


the problem with video tutorials is you need to see the word on the screen and interface so we are looking at 800x600 resalution min.. then you have audio ontop of that..the lowest i have been able to get a 10 min 800x600 vid with audio is 20 megs wich is just too big for bandwidth reasons... so i chose the wma format cause i can get files that are under 10megs and you can understand the audio and acually make out the text on the interface. its the only format that can do that.. mpeg looks like i ran a mosaic filter from photoshop on it.. its horrible... if i get more bandwidth i can upload bigger files