Z-Brush

Yesterday I continued on the mesh of the main character in 3DS Max, at the end of the day I had reached the point that I was ready to take it into z-brush and have a go at it. I had blocked in all the armour pieces but decided to only export the body itself, leaving the armour for modeling separately at a later point so they are not in the way.

I managed to get far enough to export the mesh from Max and importing it as a tool in Z-Brush, that was when things started to get tricky. It is a program that I have never used before, but I managed to figure out how to move the camera around and enter edit mode before giving up for the night.

This morning I asked for a crash course from one of my fellow artists who is very familiar with the program, this allowed me to start sculpting although it did not work out exactly as I wanted. I do find the controls a bit clumsy and the tools a bit tricky to use, but I imagine that it might just be that it needs some time getting used to.

One of the things that I tried to work on was the leather corset, it has the very basic details although I could not manage to create the sharp edges that I want, everything just seems to smudge together. Perhaps I need higher resolution on the mesh, or perhaps I smoothed the character to much before. I think that smoothing her was not a bad idea though, as I needed to remove the very square shapes and form her body. Most likely it is just due to my inexperience with the tools, I hope I get the hang of it tomorrow.

I do think that it is a bit of a risk using a new software in a project that only takes place in such a short period of time. Had not one of the team members been experienced with the program I might have decided differently.

I will have to rethink parts of the schedule as this method slightly changes the pipeline, in a way I could say that the base meshes are complete and that I should add High-Poly cards for the assets to the SCRUM. At the moment we are only continuing on the base mesh cards, which does make it seem as if we are more behind schedule than we are as they are due this week. This means creating a low-polymesh for the final meshes but we will be able to use these models to create textures.

The reason for choosing to do it this way was that I believe it can have a big impact on the textures and, if we are lucky, help us out a lot with the textures later. I was very much inspired by a tutorial I found by an environmental artist's work on World of Warcraft and was very interested in trying out that method of texturing. Another reason was having discussed with my fellow artists, especially the environmental artist who felt that our artstyle would benefit from using Z-Brush and wanted to use it himself.

If we manage to control the program to a satisfactory level in a short time period I will think of it as successful, but we do have a plan B as well which is closer to the pipeline that we have followed in previous 3D-courses. This means doing all modeling in Max (base mesh to low-poly) and then handpainting all textures in Photoshop.