Modeling a cave with full of stalactites
 

Hi!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who helped me so far improving my maya skills. Great Forum. But now I have a new project: We are shooting a scene in front of a bluescreen, which should be replaced with a cave. Here is an image, so you can imagine: http://shrani.si/f/q/Mh/27N6p186/sta...-stalaktit.jpg

I modeled an rough stalactite. No problem at all, but I wonder, how I can get all those little curves which are on the stalactite. I am not the best one for shading and texturing at all, thus I thought, you could help probably...

Greets, kimsay

Ok. I got a texture of the net and put it on a lambert. Now the stalactite looks like this. A bit flat... I heard about a "bumpmap". Found it in maya but I don't know how to use it...

Ok you could make it with bump map or i think the best will be to go into Zbrush and make those things on the stalactit it will look fantastic if you take your time !:beer:

yeah I saw some zbrush work and it is pretty cool! but I don't have the software. Could you tell me how bumpmaps work?
Would be very cool. Thank you!

Greets, kimsay

http://www.cgsutra.com/quicktuts/may...ro/qtm0001.php


or just search into google " Bump map tutorial for maya " or smth like that ... or just read the help ... it's easy i don't have time to explain sorry. But if you wait i can tell you tomorrow.

Have a lovely day :beer:

Hi!

Thanks a lot for the tutorial it was really helpful :D Not it looks much better. But I have a "scratch" at one side... I think it is because it is NURBS...
any idea how to "close" the scratch?

hm I stuck!
The stalactite looks ok for now, but I don't know how to model the cave environment and how to attach all thos stalactite to the cave ceiling... I tried a lot but everytime it doesnt look naturally. Would be very glad to hear from you guys ;)

thank you
kimsay

Try to block out the cave with cube the cave walls then simply model another stalactits and move them so they look attached. And if you are going for real look of the cave you should go into Zbrush for good nice details it will be very helpful. Unless you are good @ modeling high res models into maya but as far as i can see you are not ... so just block out the cave get the shape in the picture and then go into Zbrush for detailing ... that's how i would do that :)

Good luck

sorry I don't really understand what you mean with "block out the cave with cube..."

anyway. Thank you so far for your help!

i mean that you could make the basic shape of the cave and import your basic cave .obj file into Zbrush so you could detail it ! :)

hm never worked with zbrush... I'm downloading the trial right now...

oh my god, cant even import my maya model into zbrush... damn.

You need to export the model like .obj format and import it into Zbrush remember that Zbrush likes only 3 and 4 side faces

ok thanks that worked!
but I cant find a brush, which is good vor a cave...

ok I found some cool brushes and it looks very good in zbrush but when I reimport it back to maya it is just a polygon with 50000 faces... when I try converting to subds maya says that it couldnt save anything and quits... what shall I do now?