Punch - test

Had a bit of an experiment based of Eat 3D’s Portrait Production tutorials. Exporting displacement and normal maps from zbrush and getting them working in Maya.

Just the head for now. When everything was first set up in maya the head looked like it had exploded. This although needs to be tweaked down again is starting to look ok.

top maps out of zbrush, bottom maya screen grabs

Punch - hat

seams by slash3

Kiwi - muppetry

...because I am a muppet and didn’t think of this earlier, and I am sure that this has been thought of many, many times before.  

In Photoshop when cutting out alphas for foliage and it is already a transparency, and you want to have a black/white cutout for it, instead of trying to fill with black or white, or using the selection choices – use the black and white adjustment to make a copy of the cutout black and then invert and fill sections – it gives much nicer edges than other methods I’ve tried.

Kiwi - trees

This is the process I follow for the trees using the hollow tree from scene 1 as an example. Starting with the rough forms made for the initial sets (1), they are taken into zbrush for some rough modelling to make them less blocky (2) they are taken out of zbrush and unwrapped before being reimported and a more detailed sculpt done (3 – 5) then spotlight is used to map a bark texture so it is seamless (6).

 Maps are extracted either using the usual method or the plugin multimap exporter. The texture maps are then due for an edit in photoshop.

chinese garden update

I have been overdue for a post on Fox and Turtle. The project specs have changed to 25k total polys, and the textures need to be on two 2k maps – which left me scrambling to sort out the mesh to get that to work.

These are the current meshes for the walls section and the props themselves. The pagoda is modular and will make up a small square pagoda as well as a rectangular one.

 

The unwraps, normal maps and ambient occlusion mapped where available.

 

The maps applied (the pagoda currently in bits)