In need of Zbrush Advise
polycounter lvl 18
This is just the initial base sculpt of some stairs. The lip is a set of bricks but as you can see it's all a bit 'clay' like. Maybe when I do alphas and little dents etc it won't be so obvious but I'd like to know if you have any ideas how to improve this at it's current state?
I have been using standard, layer, pinch and flatten but not always getting the desired effect. For example with pinch when I go along the edges with this brush it's pinching both in x and y axis which causes problems when I get near corners.
Any tips/tutorials that could help? Thanks.
I have been using standard, layer, pinch and flatten but not always getting the desired effect. For example with pinch when I go along the edges with this brush it's pinching both in x and y axis which causes problems when I get near corners.
Any tips/tutorials that could help? Thanks.
Replies
http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/zbrush/pixozbrush/seb_projection.html
[edit] plus they are free!
http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/
Which includes the videos Brad posted. The Pixologic site is full of these usefull goodies. They seem very eager to teach people Zbrush.
I'm still not sure about the surfaces though. I wish I could just put a iron over it and flatten it out. I've tried flatten, clay tubes and layer brush but not getting the results I'm after. The brick above the orange dot looks about right to me, not sure how I got that to be so flat.
I think you have taken the wrong approach entirely I'm afraid.
Firstly, keep at ZBrush, as someone said, practice practice.
The issue is that you are making something that can be made far easier using a different approach. The way I would go is :
- Model a brick in your desired 3D app (heck, make a cube)
- Take to Zbrush and make it look more like a real brick.
- Do this all again.
- Do it again, in other words make 3 or 4 different bricks.
- Take them back into your 3D app of choice and line them up as you wish, using the different bricks, and alternating the rotations and possibly slight scale changes as you wish.
- tada, you have what you need.
The problem with the method you're using, is that you are trying to create something that isn't really organic.
There's nothing wrong with using ZBrush to make bricks / stone (though I only use it for detailing stonework, not creating the main shapes) however when you are making more than one in the way that you have, I believe the above method will give you better results, as it means you don't have to draw in the bricks, and sharpen them off using pinch, which often results in strange artifacts when you are pinching very hard edges and corners.
Hope I've helped in a small way.
-Adam
ZBrush fanboys insert corrections below
but you can turn the zbrush box into a box you can use,
1 creat a cube
2 go to initialize in your menu and set the parameters to make the cube brick shaped
3 go to unified skin turn resolution and smooth all the way down
4 click make unified skin
now clear what you have in your vp with a ctrl N and redraw the new cube that is in your tool pallet prob Skin_cube or somethin
under geo divide it a couple times with smt turned off (not too many times just enough to keep it blockish
add them in as subtools into your sene and place them where you want them with the transpose tools
However if you want to make a brick that you can re-use at a later date in other projects, my advice would be to follow my method (or the method I use) as within ZBrush you can't do a UV layouts. Therefore if you wanted to make a collection of fully textured bricks (including diffuse and specular textures) that can be used again later, I'd make the primitive in your 3D app, purely because you have total control over the mesh and UV's.
- Adam
http://www.brameulaers.com/tutorials/generic_wall_tutorial/generic_wall_tutorial.html
http://www.brameulaers.com/tutorials/optimisation_workflow_tutorial/optimisation_workflow_tutorial.html
[edit] Thanks Raider
Most importantly, get yourself some good references. Example:
This is looking, way way, better already. I think you should certainly put some more work into these bricks, but what you have now, if used properly would give you really good results I think. Nice job!
Ran it through mesh lab and optimized it, brought it into max. Baked it into a simple 6 poly brick and am using a shader setup called Lumonix (Is there anything out there that's more simple that will allow me to see normals in viewport on a low tech laptop?)
It generally seems to be working but there is a clear problem with the edges that appear too black. Tried flipped red and green channels and improved it but it still doesn't seem right. Any ideas?
You should have a look at this:
http://www.svartberg.com/tutorials/article_normalmaps/normalmaps.html
It describes in detail how to set up your low poly mesh and uvs and smoothing groups all so that the normals bake and display properly real time in your viewport.
I think your major problem is that you have a 6 sided cube with all one smoothing group, there for there are going to be smoothing errors, and the edges might come off weird because they are sharp corners and the normals can't compensate for this.
the most simple solution would be to bevel all the corners and rebake.
Although this greatly increases the poycount, so possibly set up different smoothing groups for the two ends and detach them from the uvs and push them a few pixels away for edge padding.
If you read the tutorial, you should understand.
As far as the real-time normal map displaying goes, it should be pretty simple for you to do. If your graphic card supports lumonix shaders then it should work with the simple "Show Hardware Map In Viewport". Lumonix is great, but probably overkill for simply viewing normals real-time.
To enable this simply plug your normal map into a standard material (go to maps>check "Bump", give it a value of 100, click on "None" next to it>choose "Normal Bump", click on "None" next to "Normal">choose "Bitmap", Select your normal map.)
Then apply this material to your brick, then go to "Views" at the top, and "Show Material in Viewport As" > "Hardware display with Maps".
You can also click an hold on the little cube in the material editor to enable "Show Material in Viewport as Hardware display with Maps".
Oh and here is a tutorial on that incase my explanation is confusing:
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow_4.htm
edit: oh hey, brad meyers made a better post
Marmoset supports them anyways.
http://www.brameulaers.com/tutorials/generic_wall_tutorial/generic_wall_tutorial.html
Keep at it!
I think you should just place them how you want them and see how it looks. Remember to rotate them and flip them of course.
What is your goal here anyways? Are you making an entire scene, or just a stair asset?