Mutant Big'en Concept Piece - New artist, first project - Zbrush.
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Hey guys,
My name's Rob M, just joined and just taking my first steps into concepting in Zbrush. Currently studying games design at Uni, 1st year in, really enjoying all the 'arty' elements and really keen to master this as it's awesome!
This piece is part of our end of year 1 project; I called mine - "A study in Zbrush".
I created some quick 2D turnarounds in Photoshop of the character I've called 'Ungelos', watched a couple of videos by Michael Pavlovich and then (perhaps rather foolishly) dived right in!
Really enjoyed this so far, though it took me ages as I don't really know what I'm doing but I've made a lot of models in 'real life' so a lot of it was almost 2nd nature to me. Furthermore I'm not the most 'techy' person in the world, as a mature student a lot of this stuff simply wasn't around when I was a teen so I've got a bit of catching up to do but I've had a little practice in 3DS Max and understand some of the basics of 3D, terms etc.
Base mesh was Zspheres, used Dynamesh to sort out the typography as I went, and the rest I did similar to how I'd work in 'real life'. All photos are screen grabs, haven't done any proper renders yet.
I'm meant to poly-paint this guy this week, slightly dreading it as have zero experience and a duff paint job can undo all my hard work!
Any advice, tips, crits (gentle, first Zbrush project yeah) are very welcome, cheers for looking!
My name's Rob M, just joined and just taking my first steps into concepting in Zbrush. Currently studying games design at Uni, 1st year in, really enjoying all the 'arty' elements and really keen to master this as it's awesome!
This piece is part of our end of year 1 project; I called mine - "A study in Zbrush".
I created some quick 2D turnarounds in Photoshop of the character I've called 'Ungelos', watched a couple of videos by Michael Pavlovich and then (perhaps rather foolishly) dived right in!
Really enjoyed this so far, though it took me ages as I don't really know what I'm doing but I've made a lot of models in 'real life' so a lot of it was almost 2nd nature to me. Furthermore I'm not the most 'techy' person in the world, as a mature student a lot of this stuff simply wasn't around when I was a teen so I've got a bit of catching up to do but I've had a little practice in 3DS Max and understand some of the basics of 3D, terms etc.
Base mesh was Zspheres, used Dynamesh to sort out the typography as I went, and the rest I did similar to how I'd work in 'real life'. All photos are screen grabs, haven't done any proper renders yet.
I'm meant to poly-paint this guy this week, slightly dreading it as have zero experience and a duff paint job can undo all my hard work!
Any advice, tips, crits (gentle, first Zbrush project yeah) are very welcome, cheers for looking!
Replies
Well regardless, today I've started poly-painting this mother! Again, I don't really know what I'm doing?!
Reminds me though of base coating a 28mm figure (which is my least favourite stage of painting to be honest, dull as dish water!)
A cool feature I discovered was I could painted some materials on to the sculpt with the colour so hopefully when I render this out these will shine through?
In real life, I'd achieve this kind of effect with different types of varnish so I hope it will do the same here.
Again please excuse the screen-grabs...doing this on the fly innit.
Edit: Something like this is what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6acICm6u58
Yeah I built it from a Zsphere base mesh and yes as you identified didn't use any subtools. Only thing I did do was I'd made those skulls on his belt as a test object 2 weeks ago and I turned them into a brush and added them to the sculpt and used dynamesh to join them together. I'm having to really rush as he needs to be done and ready to hand in on Friday at 4pm (!!!!!!!) as a result I couldn't afford to watch as many of the tutorial videos as I would have liked and have probably done this all backwards
Haha aw I wish I'd read this first, yes I'm finding that currently, trying to paint on matt rust to a more shiny metal base. Seems to throw out a werid glow around the brush strokes, I've got round it by cutting back in again with the underlaying material but it's time consuming and not quite sure how it'll look in render.
My friend has Key Shot and I think I'll use that program to render him, any advice, he just needs to be saved as an OBJ right?
Took quite a while but was just starting to get up to speed there but I gotta stop now, it's 12am here man!
Hi, pretty smart to get your stuff on here at an early stage. Here is what I can recommend:
No1: good job blocking out the pieces,although as recommended before me, it is much better to separate those as subtools. (just google and follow some instructional videos
no2: do not go into the painting phase yet, you can still do a lot with the base mesh
no3: work your pose, get a bit of antomy in there in the most important areas such as arm length, heigh and study the arm simce its the biggest part on display.
Unless you're planning to 3D print, there's no need to do that. Easier to keep things as separate subtools.
Also might want to install this plugin since the Subtool list Zbrush comes with SUUUCKS.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?198711-ZSceneManager-plugin-(SubTools-folders)
@Brian "Panda" Choi - Thanks for replying. I just used 'clay build up' brush and 'h-polish' for the armour plates and yes used dynamesh to sort out the typography afterwards. Agreed need to make better use of the subtools next time to help organise the sculpt and be more efficient with my build time.
Oh thanks for the tip I'll look into it.
Guys I could really use some advice on using Key Shot if anyone has experience of it, if there's any obvious pit falls or if anyone knows a good tut video on how to get the most out of it that would be super helpful.
Cheers for stopping by!
Rob M
Ended up just staring at him for most of that time...calling it a night now.
I had my son over in the day today as it's half term here in UK. Any of you with kids will know how demanding it is keeping a rambunctious 5 year old busy and entertained all day, I think it was a bit optimistic to think I'd have the energy to do much tonight!
So that leaves me one full day (as in 24 hours if needs be!) to get him finished as Friday has to be render and hand in day...
Poly Paint Major Lag Issue!
At my wits end today, loaded up the model, switched to low res view and tried to paint as I normally would, encountered huge lag on screen, almost unusable…it wasn't doing this last night!
I tried to dig around on-line for answers, read in a forum that over a million active points can cause issues when painting…great!
Found a plug in called decimation which lowers the active point count whilst preserving the surface detail, installed it, gave it a go and it worked brilliantly…HOWEVER, I lost all my poly-painting and materials!
Again, I have no idea what I’m doing here, I can’t seem to export the poly paint from the original as a texture map as I don’t have any UVs, so can’t work out how I would apply what I’ve done to the new lower points sculpt decimation process created.
Only got today left to finish him off, I can’t work out what to do and other than just trying to struggle on regardless which is so painful slow I’m screwed. Really, really disappointed as it was shaping up to be cool!
Due to my limited knowledge I don't even know if I can lower the display resolution and weather that will help at all?
If anyone has any advice I'd really appreciate it other wise I think I'll just have to struggle on and it'll end up looking a bit crap.
So i'll try to make it quick, hope you saved your model in incremental saves, gen01, gen02 ect.
On my current design i have 18 so far.
Do not use decimate I never do, you have 11gbs of memory so it's not an issue there, try loading up a previous version and see if everything is good there, try a restart of your machine.
If nothing else, I can only hope you can get a previous version to work, if so you can append the design to the current level of detail (latest edits/save). Add the working polypaint version to the new one (even if you made mistakes and it's gone) this should work but have the polypaint over the newest version, go to projection turn all the settings to 0 nothing highlights/selected, make sure the paint icon on the LATEST is deselected, have the working polypaint brush icon ON, and click project.
That should transfer the polypaint over, however i have no clue what might have happen (dont remember) but i once also ran into this issue.
Try having the eye on when you try to paint also have MRGB on and ZAdd/ZSub off or down to 0 might help also.
Good luck, let us know.P.s. i have issues with having layers on and working with polypaint you have to bake them down and have no layers when working with polypaint at least that is my experience.
My god, the oldest IT solution in the book: "Have you tried turning it off and on again"?! AND IT WORKED!
Thankfully, I stubbornly worked on for the last 4 hours or so through the lag, got a good chunk done (albeit in a very loose manner as it was bloody difficult to paint like that, had to not move the camera and stay zoomed right out) just read this now, restarted and BAM it's operating normally again...bizarre maybe Zbrush hadn't loaded up properly or my PC was mucking about in the background but it was fine until I actually tried to paint on the model then slowed right down...Bug/glitch?
Phew, well I had resided myself to just trying to do my best and had thought I'd come to as good a stage as I was going to get to but thankfully I can now cut back in and sharpen up some of that work. Oh man, tense haha
Thank you again dude so much, haha seems so obvious now
TLDR : TLCR = Can't read.
I would much rather you went to youtube to look up a proper guide with video that would help much more than reading all this.
Also I don't know the guidelines to your project, idk if they want you to make a game res version an texture that one, if they do 500k is too much. If not (should state somewhere or that "teacher" is bad.) or the project is a stage before the next semester (increase in knowledge idk).
Anywoot,
I came back to add that you can look up how to unwrap in zbrush, if i remember that once time i did it. That you paint where you want the seam to be, so what i would do is make a duplicate of the final, ZRemesh with a setting around 10 < usually zbrush addes 3-8k more to the meshes, though YOU manually creating a decent topology is the way to go, a.f.a.i am concerned(full control is best).
You draw your seams locations, though practice or knowledge on how to go about that takes a bit of time but usually aim to hide seams that are created so best practice is to hide them at not so noticeable areas. (360 viewing in mind.)
Then use the Plugin to unwrap the meshes, same location as the (decimation master).
To get the texture map / vertex color data i think you have to create a texture map via that option in the Tools panel list, somewhere around the mid bottom of the list. (all of this is off memory)
Click the desired resolution, 2048 seems to be good for him.
I would much rather you went to youtube to look up a proper guide with video that would help much more than reading all this.
A search of : Zbrush Unwrap guide/tutorial Game Mesh might help. Again would love to see any updates to this, not a bad concept was it yours or the teacher/projects?
So he's a bit stylised and a couple of areas weren't quite as detailed as I would have liked. It would have been nicer to have gotten a little closer to realism here but considering just a few hours ago I felt I'd never even get to this stage I think I've done pretty well considering and this was all a learning experience...a horrible tense panic filled learning experience! Haha I jest.
So some stuff I learnt:
1. Poly painting in materials doesn’t work very well. The transition between one material and the other is too messy and looks pixelated. I assume this is because to Zbrush a polygon can only be one material or another, there’s no mid ground.
2. Resolution makes a huge difference to how the paint comes out, on the face it was hard to get in and super detailed whereas the body there was more than enough polys to paint on. I think this could have been combated by separating the head off as a separate subtool and upping the resolution of that separately. I tried to do this by masking it off from the rest of the body and then upping the resolution but looking at the model through the wireframe mode I can’t tell if this actually worked or not.
3. Subtools! It would have been so handy to have just clicked a button and all the model expect the eye for example had hidden from view, I had to paint around some really tricky angels, acceptable for this project as it still looks good enough but a bit sloppy for industry I imagine. The answer to this is there just wasn’t time for me to watch any more tutorial videos as I had so much work to do but I will definitely be going back to get to grips with those!
4. Don’t panic! Panic changes nothing, in fact it can distract you from obvious solutions as you’re too busy panicking! Do your very best with what you’ve got and no-one can ask more of you then that. I was half expecting to have to hand in an unfinished piece, my logic was well if at least I can at least explain what went wrong and show I tried my best in the situation my tutors will understand. I’m very glad to say I won’t have to do this now, and although I would have liked to have had a bit more time on him I think it’s come out pretty well.
Final steps tomorrow are to export him as an OBJ (I’m hoping this will keep all the materials and poly paint information associated with the sculpt), load that into Key Shot and do a few nice renders of him . I might also quickly knock up a suitable background image for him too in Photoshop, quick photo painting of a post-apocalyptic underpass or such like.
As a back up, I’ve also set aside enough time to come home and do some renders from within Zbrush if Key Shot doesn’t work as anticipated as this program is an unknown to me.
@Davidcruz - Thank you for the tips really appricate it. In regards to your comments above, I set the perimeters in a sense for this project as it was our 'individual project' the final one of this year. I'm more of a concept artist by heart so I wanted to do something in Zbrush as I was keen to try it out and had seen so much great stuff produced by others. To that end this is really a concept piece and as such I just have to make it as awesome as I can, poly count and typography to a degree are almost irrelevant as I guess I would then hand this to a game modeller who would take it to make a high-poly from and use my paintings for the texture maps and so forth. All the art, less of the techy stuff
My tutor for this project is a great guy who's done industry work before but he doesn't use Zbrush at all, he's a 3DS Max guy, and uses Mudbox when he needs to sculpt in any extra details. In fact Uni as a whole doesn't support Zbrush. I was lucky enough to buy a license before starting there as I thought it looked awesome, so I was kind of on my own with this one but he did help point me in the right direction and suggest topics to research etc.
Concept/art was mine, bloody love mutants!
Thanks to everyone who viewed and commented, I'll see if I can post the finished renders up too after I've got all this business out of the way.
You need it to get the vertex colors to look nice, if this was around 1000 it wouldn't look as nice as it does now.
I only play with poly paint to get a decent base or final (depends) but yes OBJ's support Vertex Colors, HOWEVER i don't know how to get V colors to be redistributed from max back to a new OBJ once imported just a heads up. Label the Zbrush obj Zbursh or something to know the difference if you do, do that, don't over write the z .obj or it is bad news bears.
Congrats, hope to see more as you learn more, not bad.
As promised here's the renders (I couldn't get Key Shot to behave properly with the poly paint/materials, so just did them in Zbrush in the end)
Enjoy and thanks for viewing!