Anatomy - Treybor's ZBrush Experiments

[Treybor]

Originally Posted by Woody

Hi Sean,
I actually just recorded a timelapse sculpting session in response to this, but I don't want to hijack your thread. If you're interested in seeing my solution, check out my sketchbook page for my suggestions on how to do this sort of thing.

Awesome! I'll take a look.

[Treybor]

GAH!!! After reviewing Woody's video I realized that I broke my two cardinal rules....
1) Never model when you're tired or distracted....
2) Always keep your refs handy....

I blew it on the wing. Reversed the direction of the feather overlay and screwed up the feather rows...I'll revert back and start over. At least it should be a little quicker this time.

[Treybor]

Well, worked on the Nike again this weekend. I went through and reviewed the images of the work I'd done.

first I compared it to the actual wing of the statue.


1) It has simailarities but it was primarily inaccurate. It did not match.
2) The NIke statue's wings are not really true avian wing designs. The Nike wing seems to have some features of a doves wings and some features of an owl's wings.

So I compared my sculpt to an actual avian wing structure.


It has simailarities but it was quite flawed. It looked more like a crumpled owl's wing
Now I had to decide where to go from here. Do I make it accurate to the statue ir accurate to a true avian wing? I decided to make it look more like an avian wing.
After about two hours of cleanup adjustment and rework I came up with this:




There's lots still to do but I'm much happier with it
So I took a break from Nike and started on my Aegis shield. This is about an hour's worth of work. I started by finding an old Medusa logo I'd made for the Blade Runner Fan Film. I used Spotlight to emboss the pattern of the snakes and face onto the surface of the shield. Then I used the sculpting tools to build the face outwards and make it more realistic. This represents about an hour's worth of work.

[BillS]

The wings look fantastic now! The shield is coming along well to.

[Afalk]

Gorgeous updates and while I really liked the artistic approach you had going, the more realistic wings could be just positively stunning so I am waiting w/anticipation to see just how this turns out. As for the shield, very impressive, esp for such a short time.

[JimCrafton]

Sigh, I guess I'm going to have to join in here. Throw more fuel on the fire!
Seriously, really looking good, interesting to watch someone approach something like this.
I'm curious how are you making the feathers? I would be tempted to start at the outside, use the mask brush, mask off one feather, inflate and then use the Dam Standard to cut the inset edge, and repeat for each feather.

[Rigel]

The wing does look much better now.

[Woody]

Mucho mo bedda!

[Treybor]

Originally Posted by BillS

The wings look fantastic now! The shield is coming along well to.

Originally Posted by Woody

Mucho mo bedda!

Originally Posted by Rigel

The wing does look much better now.

Thanks Guys!

Originally Posted by Afalk

Gorgeous updates and while I really liked the artistic approach you had going, the more realistic wings could be just positively stunning so I am waiting w/anticipation to see just how this turns out. As for the shield, very impressive, esp for such a short time.

Thanks....after working on the wings, and re-working the wings, the shield was easy...

Originally Posted by JimCrafton

Sigh, I guess I'm going to have to join in here. Throw more fuel on the fire!
Seriously, really looking good, interesting to watch someone approach something like this. I'm curious how are you making the feathers? I would be tempted to start at the outside, use the mask brush, mask off one feather, inflate and then use the Dam Standard to cut the inset edge, and repeat for each feather.

1- Mask the area of the back the wing will be extruded from
2- Use snake hook to pull the basic wing shape out
3- Remesh using dynamesh
4- Load the wing template into a spotlight, and then use move to adjust the shape
5- Use a low intensity Dam Standard to lay out the lines for the rows of feathers
6- Use the mask tool to mask the wing off from the rest of the mesh
7- Start at the outside row, using clay, smooth and Dam Standard build up and cut down edges... Did not mask each feather...no need
8- Finish off each row and start with the next. Go to the other side of the wing and repeat the process.

I did not use symmetry for two reasons.

1- I extruded the wing at an angle from the back
2- The wing is not identical on both sides. The overlap of the feathers is different on both sides. On the interior of the wing the feathers overlap towards the body of the bird. On the exterior of the wing teh feathers overlap toward the wing tip. I wanted to keep it anatomically correct.

Now working on wing, If I can, I'll most likely use a tutorial Woody made me on masking and saving sections of the mesh. That way I can use symmetry to mirror the wing, save it out, and re-insert it.

[Woody]

Pretty smart. I wish that I had had that sort of mindset when I first started learning ZBrush.

[Treybor]

Originally Posted by Woody

Pretty smart. I wish that I had had that sort of mindset when I first started learning ZBrush.

Thanks. Your tips and tutorials have been invaluable.

[Eden]

Quality update! Glad that you decided to go with the avian wing! and another cool sculpt in progress....multitasking strong start to the Aegis shield looking forward to seeing more!

[wave of light]

Well played with the wings re-scuplt. Thanks for the breakdown too.

[Treybor]

Worked on Nike this afternoon. Duplicated the wing and mirrored it to the right side.
Modified a bunch of the folds and then droped it into Lightcap. No real textures on her at the moment, I was trying for a polished marble feel. Was just thinking how well this would go in the F3D llibrary mesh

[JimCrafton]

Yowza! That's looking really sharp! Great job with the folds and wings.

[Klavs81]

That's beautiful! Great work!

[Gordon Robb]

You should be proud. Looks awesome. what's lightcap?

[Treybor]

Thanks guys.

Originally Posted by Gordon Robb

You should be proud. Looks awesome. what's lightcap?

Lightcap is a function in the Light menu in Zbrush to create and adjust lights effects on materials. I think it's new with 4R2B.

[Davide_sd]

awesome work!!!

[Gordon Robb]

Yes, I remember now. Never used it.

[Rigel]

It looks awesome Sean.

[Eden]

Great work…Loving the lightcap renders. Creating a convincing weathered marble will be a challenge, looking forward to seeing how you approach it.

[bmckain]

Incredible work Sean.

[JimCrafton]

Hey just found this, thought it might be useful:
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index....:_Bird_of_Prey

See the feathers section.

[Treybor]

Thanks All! Jim, I'll check it out tonight! ありがとう!

[Treybor]

Hey guys. I'm going to try painting on some textures. Seems fairly straight forward with the pixel paint function and the Spotlight painting function.

I was wondering though:
1) how does Zbrush handle UV maps? From the tutorial I saw it looked like it was mapping the UV's by blocks.
2) is there a UV map Viewer in ZB?
3) does it automatically save UV maps for you? If so... where?

I know I'm asking lots of questions, and my brain has been a sponge for this stuff since I got the app. But the online tutorials seem to make assumptions that the user will know all of the panels inside and out. I don't and I'm eager to learn.

[DELTA]

You disappoint me Sean... The left outer wing feather is 1/8mm out of alignment.... Shocking... You're getting soft...

[JimCrafton]

1) ZB can create them for you, in which case the typical method is the groups or AUV or variations like that. That will produce the block squares that you've seen. You can also use UV Master to create UVs, which I personally really like for doing basic stuff. Quick and really easy to use. You can use Goz to open up your mesh in some other editor (modo for example) and do the uvs there, then when you back to zb, via Goz, the model will have UV's.

2) sort of. If you go to UV Master, clone your master mesh (assuming it's got UVs), make sure the cloned mesh is active, then hit Flatten in UV Master, it will show the UVs. Some what of a PITA.

3)Yes, the UVs will go along with the ztool. When you export to obj the uv's will get exported as well. If you use Goz, it will also export the UVs to whatever 3d editor you have configured it with.

[JimCrafton]

http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/...son/uv-master/

UV Master - Getting started [1 of 5] - YouTube

UV Master - Getting started [1 of 5] - YouTube

[JimCrafton]

Maybe this also makes it clearer for viewing the UV's