Indigo Renderer Forum

Ok, here's the result of my second Zbrush weekend. I tried to elaborate on my recent potatoe man and give him more human features. I think this one is better than the previous one, but still stuck somewhere between human and amorphous vegetable. Not easy! But fun.
Also, I couldn't finish the sculpt this weekend. The only finished bit is really the face, hence the abundance of equipment to hide the rougher parts. Since I had limited time on ZB, I decided to spend a few days working on the textures and lighting. Lots and lots of light tests for this one. Thankfully, the mesh was much lighter this time, so no need to cut it into tiny pieces.
The final image is a merger of two different renders. I've added some bloom in PS and spent some time tweaking saturation and contrast. Hope you like it.
(Rendered overnight with version 1.01 at 2400x1800. A big cheers to Nick for this amazing piece of software!!!)

Damn ! It's very good !
Your modeling skills are amazing !

Fantastic!!
I love it!

Tell me, do you also have good drawing skills? I'm wondering how hard it is to produce something like that in Zbrush? Some anatomy skills are essential i think.

Thanks guys. Much appreciated.
A couple of thoughts: I used to draw quite a lot but no longer do. In fact, CG for me was a way back into this old hobby of mine with the advantage of not having to deal with the mess of pencils, colours and so on. But the good thing about ZB is that it makes it so easy to achieve satisfying results with minimal artistic skills (and, just in passing, it is not even very expensive).
I never sculpted anything in my life, yet I find it very easy and intuitive to use. Obviously you'd need a lot of practice (and a tablet) to obtain the kind of stuff they show on their websites. But doodling is fun. As far as I'm concerned, I like working from photographic references, which means you don't need much anatomy knowledge. You just look at the image and try to get a feel for how the skin folds, how it rests on bones and drops with gravity, and what wrinkles really look like. It's very un-scientific and instinctive, but ZB gives you all the tools to do that - plus very nice painting tools to put colour on your sculpture.
I see two limitations, though. Because ZB generates meshes of several million polygons, you need to export a lower division version into Blender (or any polymodelling software) to render. The fine details are provided by a displacement map, and since Indigo doesn't do displacement, you have to use it as a bump map, which means the level of details will always be much lower in the render than it is in ZB. It's a limitation, and I'm afraid it will stay that way because even unbiased renders that have displacement (like Fry) are way too inefficient to use it on such complex meshes. It just doesn't work.
The other thing to bear in mind is that UVs are hugely important for this. Bad UVs will smooth the tiny skin details on the displacement map (even a 4K one) into a big blur and you will lose all your detailing. So in order to get great results you need to be good at dealing with UVs, which I'm completely crap at (this models uses ZB-generated UVs, which are good but not great and create maps that cannot be edited in PS).
Just as few random thoughts, as I said.

I don't think, BbB, that you need to hope that we will like your work. You are a natural. All of your work is incredible and, what makes it worse is, you make it all look so damned easy!

WoaH!!!!!!

Fantastic!!!! Modeling and Render 10 10 10

I suppose you need to have a very strong CPU to play with ZBrush ?

Stur wrote:I suppose you need to have a very strong CPU to play with ZBrush ?

I'd say graphics card and the amount of RAM are more important for heavy polys

Yep, if ZBrush uses graphic cards.

Blender's sculpt mode tends to get very slow when the number of polys raises. Sharp Construct too. On my computer, it was slow enough for me to abandon

Zbrush could handle that better. It does heavily rely on CPU as well, since it has multi-thread drawing feature.

Textures are amazing BbB ! If there were not the eyes I'd tell the same for the zbrushhing. The bottom part of the face, neck to nose, is very good.

DaveC
ortega
Cheers guys. Thanks for the kind words and encouragement.

Stur
I haven't run ZB on my rig, so I can't tell you how it performs under a specific set-up. As far as I understand, though, it uses several tricks to allow up to a billion polygons to show fluidly on the screen. I think it's got to do with only calculating the part of the mesh you're working on. You can tell, when you rotate the mesh, that the subdivision level drops dramatically and is recalculated when you stop. And yes, as Suvakas said, your mesh's maximum polycount depends on how much memory you allocate to the software.

CTZn
Yep, the eyes are definitely potatoe-like. That's one area that was pretty detailed in the ZB sculpt but got quite blobby when exporting. No doubt my modelling is to blame, but the mesh you see here is also three subdivision levels below the ZB mesh (less than 2 per cent of the original polycount!) with only a bump map to try and bridge this gap.

great modelling, as usual!
scary eyes ^^

great modelling and light conditions...but the skin mat looks weird...maybe too reflective(?)
\
very good concept at all

Thanks Kram, Kosmo. Yes, perhaps the skin is too reflective. Neither does it have SSS. I know it says "finished artwork", but I think I might have another go at it. I kinda like it but it's not really finished...

BbB
Freaking awesome, as always.