Did this the other day for kicks, but trying to get myself in the hait of showing more of my work, so figured I'd post it. About an hour and a half in ZB3 from a sphere, w/all subobjects either being made from spheres or mask extrusions:
2. Adjustyour MD material presets. from what I've noticed, certain presets don't really read as advertised. You also need to do you own adjustment. 3. Do a slight shell extrusions http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/File:Fluffy-fur-breakdown.jpg or do small fly away cards of fuzz
Look for more depth in edge bevel size and extrusion depth. Your back wall looks like it's had some details pasted on, rather than being made of some heavy, chunky machinery. Also keep in mind that exaggerating your bevels is probably a good idea to get a better normal bake out of it.
Thanks for your concern about my low poly hah, but it's not being baked on to a flat surface. It's hard to tell because I posted the picture from the angle I did, but trust me it has plenty of "extrusion" and shape to it. I'll post a more completed and better angle of it later so you can see.
I have tried afew times now to model a lizard head, all of them complete failures. Could anyone give any tips perhaps. Currently I start with a five sided box and model out half of the head. I haven't tried yet modeling by edge extrusion, but will hpefully try that tomorrow.
so if the red is the outline of the obj that I attached.. so that is my base shape, what would you use as the green area to get the various shapes, extrusions, edges etc? Also, would you be using dynamesh or just subdviding to get more polys in play?
In Xnormal to get a cage, is go to 3d viewer after you pick your LP and HP, check show cage, edit cage then use the cage global extrusion to push out the cage so it covers the entire mesh, Save meshes as a Sbm and then bake away.
Xforms is a little option that lets you reset your bounding box to its original state after intensive cuts, bevel, and extrusions. In 3dsmax its located in the utility tab and named "reset Xforms". For your first question, play abit with some of the concept here
Two other options that come to mind:* Radial Symmetry can also make quick work out of this. * If the basemesh was made out of a sphere that ends with a pole, then the topology should already be in the basic grid pattern. Zmodeling can give every face a nice extrusion for the bumps.
I think it's useful to know how to do simple things like extrusions, inserting loops and removing them, etc. You can use it in conjunction with zspheres or zremesher to build fast basemeshes. For anything complicated I would use something other than ZBrush.