escaping the lab - *.obj for download added

[Tim Leydecker]

In a thread of Spiraloid, Pixolator describes a workflow for
swapping out higher levels of subdivision using *.obj files.
In a nutshell, this also allows to reconstruct a lowrez mesh
from a highly subdivided clothsolve. Here´s the link to the
post:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/sho...94&postcount=2

Following up, I tried it with my solved mesh of the clotharm
and could bring the mesh down one step, you can try it yourself
here´s the file, 160kB *.obj. It´s not perfect, seems you may
get better results if you create a lowrez in your favourite app,
subdivide in ZBrush, import that back to your favourite app, do
a clothsolve on it and reimport it (to the appropriate level) back
into ZBrush. In my example file, you may run into a memory warning
and a crash - I currently have only 1024MB of memory allocated to
ZBrush...

http://www.hafenlola.com/downloads/Leydecker_highrezclotharm.zip

Thanks Pixolator and Bay for the inspiration.

Cheers

tim

[Tim Leydecker]

Harry Bardak from the xsi softimage mailinglist helped me
a great deal in getting flickerfree, easy to setup renders
using ambient occlusion w/environment sampling instead
of relying on FinalGathering. Results in a turntable, H.264
compressed, 512kB, 1Minute/frame rendertime. Love it...

http://www.hafenlola.com/downloads/Ley_mibAO_H264.mov

You´ll notice I´m still not finished merging everything up,
symmetry all over the place, veeery long arms, details missing.
Can´t do much on the guy this week but hope to put some
more time into him this weekend, finally getting to use Zbrush ...

[Sebcesoir]

Very nice rendering and cool character.

Isn't there something to check around the arm position, they might lok a bit too low on shoulders?
It might be an illusion due to the jacket...

Cool technic to generate natural cloth wrinkles. But you could also had psculpted it

[Tim Leydecker]

Hi Sebastien,

there´s definitely something wrong with the arms and the shoulders.
I´ll probably shorten the arms slightly and move them up a faint bit.
Should also help in fitting a belt inbetween, a 1911 holster and stuff
like an ammopouch and canteen. Also need to fix the leggings, lower
and shorter, less knit. Regarding the cloth, I ended up remodeling the
major parts of it but it´s still a great help to solve them first, they get
a more natural look and wheight I find. I think I wouldn´t have gotten
such nice volumes wthout the solve as a reference but instead would
have ended up with a more slimfit look...

Next thing to do is to first finish all the seperate parts in cleanup, as
they are probably good enough to build a modelDB from them, the jacket,
the boots, the trousers could be recyclable. It´s tedious but a timesaver
for building other *.mil characters from them.

This one is supposed to look like a ~55/60ies assistant MP, some sort of
Area 51 lab setting, he´ll have an early M16 grabbed and an extra bandolier
with ammo (if I´m not too lazy) thrown over is shoulder, M1 helmet, the
knife fixed to the gun, searching for escaped subjects down in the lab...

...Or maybe I´ll give him some other rifle, an M14 or M3A1, would fit the
decade better. Could also land short and´ll first do something else...

Cheers

tim

P.S: I like your *Vegas* characters alot, marvelous details.

[Tim Leydecker]

merged the snippets into one mesh yesterday, took me a
significant amount of time and proved quite disappointing
since I lost quite a bit of shape and detail while lining up
the edgeloops and creating the all quad mesh. 350kB, H264:

http://www.hafenlola.com/downloads/Ley_mibBO_H264.mov

Mostly visible at the legs, the folds lost their wheight and
the proportions got a more stumped look. Intentionally fixed
the armlength as well as necklength and position of the head.

He looks younger now. I´m not sure wether I like it, may end
up redoing the trousers while I give him a last check for tri´s.

Cheers,


tim

P.S: I don´t upload the files to prevent thenm from appearing
in the latest pics row, since technically, there´s no ZBrush yet...

[Pride]

Tim, I have printed the boots in wax at 1/4 scale. They were a great start and saved me a lot of time. I needed boots for a figure I modeled in Zbrush.
They were bilt up at .07mm per layer [the machine will do .02mm] to
save hours of print time. I can clean the surface up easily. Added some folds
and caps.

Thanks again

[bjekx]

omg.... im gotta have one of those for xmas...

[slocik]

me to !! definetly !
omg, i just imagineg how much i could do with that, bet that cost way to much :/

[Tim Leydecker]

hey Pride,

looks awesome. It´s only now that I realized I shoud have
brought the loops to put the bootlaces through more together.

I did that on my own model while creating the shoelaces but
not on the basemesh, maybe I´ll give the boot.obj an update.
(Not before mid july...)

Whatever, hope you found the boots useful anyway, I really
like what you did with them in *real 3D*.

Cheers

tim

[Tim Leydecker]

Since this thread has somewhat involved into the place
to host the stuff I fiddle with in regards to ZBrush, testing,
trying, experimenting - kind of fits the title - I decided to
post another prop from the *.lab I fancy alot:



Textured in ZBrush using Zapplink w/Photoshop, rendered
in Maya/IBL, using a 32bit *.ct file create in XSI by simply
rendermapping a fully reflective sphere in the middle of my
prelit set. I´ll now try *.hdr lighting inside ZBrush using said
spherical environment texture to get a somewhat predictable
impression of the look while modeling/texturing further stuff.

Hope you find the above workflow description useful, I love
the endless possibilities I get from having ZBrush around.

Cheers

tim

[x-titan]

I really love the cart with the cloth. It reads as very believeable to me, the cloth especially, I particularly find it hard to work on cloth. Great work, keep it up

[Tim Leydecker]

Hi Pavlin,

yeah. Cloth is really hard to get right. I´m not 100%
satisfied with the above, the sheet lost some feeling
of wheight while I optimized it into the lowrez-version.
I´ll rework it a bit while I finish painting in those folds.

Below is another image showing my texturingprocess
in general, neither requires ZBrush nor a Wacom really.
But Zbrush helps quite a bit in projecting large chunks
of texturereference onto the mesh, even from weirdest
angles as the basecolorlayer to fiddle with in Photoshop,
then go back and forth between apps to finetune things.




Cheers

tim

[Erklaerbar]

nice trick with wires. Didnt think of that yet. great renders too!

[TotalScore]

doood this thread rocks!!!!

[Tim Leydecker]

Been offsite working a bit the last month or so
instead of going for holidays - well, next year...

Whatever, haven´t had too much time to do
anything too brave but at least managed to
get some halfdecent renderings out of mR.

Am currently working on the props and also
still redo edgeloops here and there, actually
would even like to change major parts, too.







Hope you like those images, it´s been quite
a hassle to get mR to put out these buggers.
Photoshoped for effect, here, there and there.

Cheers

tim