dino_chick
 

been working on this as an experminet with zbrush. I was looking at learning more about displacement and normal mapping. It was just the head but i think ive decided to try and take it further so ive just added the body, which i'll take over to z and see what more I can do. No real end idea in sight. I am quite pleased with the head so far, if I can be as pleased with the body, i'll consider it success

Hi Ben
You might want to turn the legs around (so his knee is at the back)and give him some toes before you take him into zbrush, also think where you want detail to be and add extra geometry in maya first this will help your poly count in zbrush.........dave

Hi dave. I was unsure myself about the knee. Do you mean like a horses knee? There is an odd kink in the picture above, like two knees, but I knew Id be able to adapt in zbrush. below is one of the ref images I have collected. It is a trex but i checked with something smaller (velociraptor) and the knee points out to the front.


Photoshop playing me up today for some reason so cant put up a picture of todays progress, but knee wise I think its ok. Hopefully later whatevers making photoshop cry will have disappeared and I can post.

Check on the polycount front. Looped up good for z, started primary forms at level 3/4, currently on secondary at level 5, level 6 is weighing in at around 6.5 mil. So based on my limited experience I think its set up ok.?

And yes, feet and toes added, plus some little arms and a couple of fingers, and a little triangular devily tail (not aiming for 100% natural realism!) Have had thoughts of giving him a crown, maybe spikes, teeth, a tongue. Keep picturing some cloth draped over him in places, which is making me wonder about n-cloth and zbrush. Getting flashbacks of a creature I designed in year 12. Inspired by The Dark Crystal. We'll see.

The one problem so far is the merged points at the tip of his tail, when subdivided in z, they suddenly shoot off into the distance, one of those tell tale zbrushy/maya-ry quirks, but Ive imported it back into maya and found I can just delete the extra faces it creates/moves. So...

in fact... I might actually need some more geometry around the arms, they werent behaving very well in Z

Hi Ben
I was thinking chick legs not dinsaur, geometry shooting of into the distance is not a good sign like you said some vertices not merged in maya hope this does not put your maps out..............dave

PS when dealing with small appendages like low geometry arms in zbrush turn down the intencaty in the brush, if left high things like that shrival away

About the legs... it looks like you've got the right idea, except that the ankle looks a bit short when you compare to the dino pic you posted. Only the toes should really touch the ground. This is the same with chickens, we think the knee is backwards, but that's only cause the the thigh is hidden. The ankle is the bit that bends back.

And on a similar note... I don't know of any dinosaurs that have wings. Looks more like a dragon to me ;) but that's not really a criticism. Looks good.

dave ... intencaty? is that spelt right? That sounds like a good useful tip though I will definitely be looking to find that. Do u mean intensity? as in brush/stroke intensity. Its not the first time ive had problems with shrivelling (!??:eek: )

Stwert. Dragon! yes!, thats the word I was looking for! and i will rethink those 'ankles' when i next sculpt

Hi Ben
Yes you spelled it wright, this is more a problem in the low subdivide levels. a little tip with zbrush if say you are at level 6 and you want to make a big change in you model move down to level 1, the brushes have more effect........dave

I am not sure what the extrusions from the back are? If they are part of some kind of wings then I think they need to be farther forward. Hard to tell on my screen as I keep the gamma fairly low and so most images are very dark and hard to make out detail.

It has a kind of sea horse looking head. I like the texturing. Although the torso appears blurry relative to the other parts.

I need to spend some time in zbrush but I have so many other things on my plate.

Hi CT. Thankyou. The extrusions are meant to be wings. I shall keep your comment in mind, I think they are going to be the hardest part, its the only part which I really have something in mind how I want the final outcome to look.

The blurring on the body at the moment is because I am just reusing the head textures for wip purposes. When I made the head I hadnt planned to add a body. When Ive worked more on the body in zbrush i will create seperate textures for the body.

Hey all. I didnt really want to post this, as I would have liked to have got more done before posting again, but Ive hit a snag creating some textures, so I thought id post this latest wip. Im unsure where Im going to go with the hands, whether to make new geometry in maya, or maybe have him holding something and then add the fingers to what he's holding. And thinking of background aswell, ...ive got no ideas for that.

But thats getting ahead of myself I guess. Im having trouble getting a 4096 or even 2048 colour map out of zbrush, which I need as a lower res map is not doing me any favours. Ive done a poly paint, but cant get the info into a decent size map.

Might have to restart the paint..its only a basic undercoat.

Anyway...

Looks good so far, the renders could use a little sharpening up though. For a background you could try a lush jungle type setting, that's the first thing that came to mind.

:) Thanks genny

How do you mean sharpening up? do you mean anti-aliasing wise? or level of detail/shading wise? or something else? just like, more punchy?

Hadnt thought of jungle. I keep thinking rock, or seeing a castle type room. a lush jungle setting sounds quite daunting, im not sure id know where to start...id like to use zbrush more whatever it is.

Just been playing with some different lighting bits and bobs. Took a physical sky render. Wont be on computer long now but will try out that gamma thing when Im next on.

Well I think you could bring out the details in the texture some. I don't know if its the texture filter doing it, or the texture was maybe painted that way, maybe an adjustment in the render settings would help. Its the contrast, everything is kinda green and blurry. The castle room doesn't sound like a bad idea, you could Zbrush the hell outta those walls lol :p and let me know if the sky thing works out.


P.S

Also I noticed you made the neck considerably thinner, looks like it would snap under the weight of that head.

ha ha. yeah, thats what I thought about the walls!

when I was reading about rendering displacement maps it was suggested to take off filtering, I guess its same too with the normal map. Thats one of the points behind this excerice is exploring zmapper and the different settings, and also how the exported maps then look in maya. Im trying to get more comfortable and get some experience with using zbrush and maya side by side. So things like, the quality and depth of normal and cavity maps im going to be exploring. Getting that 4096 map was a start, needed to install a plug-in for that.

The shaders for the head and body aren't quite matching up, which is a bit annoying cause i was quite pleased with the level of detail on the head. But I think the alpha work in zbrush was a bit deeper on the head, so will be going over the body again. I want to scuplt more skin folds and creases on the body, I just stuck aload of rough detail on to get a feel for how it might look, but I'll be reworking most of it.

re: the neck. Yeah, i didnt conciously thin it, it just kinda happened, im thinking maybe im can rescale once im settled on the sculpting and textures. I did kind of give myself a problem when i decided to just stick on a body. I thought about some neck rings like some you see some tribal people wear, that stretch the neck? to cover things up a bit. still considering giving him some armour/accessories....

Im not feeling very satisfied with the way this has gone. Had some trouble again with textures, and getting zbrush to do what i wanted it to do. Thought just chucking some things on might reveal some ideas for ways to take it forward, but no such concrete luck. So after a day where I feel Ive more gone backwards than forwards, heres where its at...

another update.

sorry. I meant to post this one.

Im wondering whether ive gone in the wrong direction with this. The original dragon model had a sort of realistic look and feel, or at least, it was heading in that kind of direction. I think i might have cheapened it by the scene ive put it in, which has a sort of cartoony feel to it. Im thinking i should go back to where i was in the third post in this thread and continue from there just concentrating on the dragon.


Anybody have any views?

Hi Ben
You could use photo of jungle or what ever to find the setting that most fits him, play about a bit..........dave

I keep looking at this, and although im feeling a bit torn whether to continue or go back to an earlier stage, i keep seeing stuff. I keep picturing like an oldish dwark/elf kind of character pulling him along, and the colours of the background make me see like a patch of fog across an ocean, sort of greeny a bit sinister, and then a shipwreck and/or a mountain/volcano in the background.

I just dont know how much of it i could get in without crashing.

... this might sound like a bit of a crazy home scientist idea, but we've all heard of computer 'farming' yeah.... how easy is it, if at all possible, to connect computers together to get more power/memory/capability.. has anyone tried it? theres an old computer sitting around my place, windows xp, whereas mine is vista, its really crap and old, but would it be possible?

this is what i can see to add, amongst other things!

Well you can render stuff out in layers. If the pc laying around is old and "crap" it would hardly be worth it, especially since there is only one. When you said "old" and Windows XP, slow single core cpu was the first thing I thought and you'd be setting yourself up for disappointment if you actually expected anything from it, though I'd find it fun to try.

Ive mentioned it to a few people, who've all kinda laughed at me. I just get carried away with seeing little things i want to add. at school in art i always liked adding little details that you might not see when you first looked but might notice the second or third time. I guess I need to upgrade computer or at least to windows 7 if i want any realistic chance of improving performance.

was the same with my bee scene. kind of just carried on going and going, but had to stop when it got too much for the computer.
i dont know. i wanta try displacing some more of the foreground elements in this, but dont think ill get away with it

when you say render stuff out in layers, do you mean that you can render say, just the floor, and all the computing power will go into just that, and then say, the background, the paint effects etc all seperately. I was watching that alex alvarez tutorial, and he loaded the alpha channel of a character in photoshop to isolate it and then add a background. I find it hard to get my head around how that works, if you render everything seperate and then composite and have it all end up looking like its part of the same scene. Do all renders automatically have an aplha channel?

very wierd evening. Maya was being good to me! wanted to try out some displacement maps on a few of the objects, and every time got a result almost straight off. I dont understand, even on the dragon's body, it hasnt ripped apart any seems, not that i can notice anyway.

unfortunately after all that i sat and waited about an hour for it to render and then once it had finished it wiped the image and decided to render all over again. Thanks Maya!

Heres an update rendered previous. Nothing major, just the floor and wall displaced a bit.

Yes. If its not in the layer it won't be considered, sooo don't forget about your lights and such :x. You can even customize the render settings per layer.

By default that is enabled, of course you can specify otherwise. Though, if you render out to something like jpeg or bmp then you're stuck because those formats only store rgb data.

having decided to add a kind of cart to the right hand side of the scene, i got to the point i figured was coming, and mental ray 'out of memory'.


so... started having a little read and look for alpha channel info. I see there is a checkbox in the render settings, and as you say genny, it is checked by default. I saved out my test renders as Tiffs.

Its a bit strange because im thinking its hard to isolate elements if theyre all casting shadows. And also in the first few quick renders I did, all thats really happening is the background (if there is none) gets isolated from all the actual 'positive' objects.

im guessing theres a way to give individual geometry its own alpha channel?

But then Im thinking...shadows. I first of all isolated the cart in my scene and rendered it, then added it to a previous wip, but obviously it therefore had no shadow. So i rendered it with all the lights and anything that would be affecting its lighting or vice versa, but then that includes most of the stuff in the seen so... all i left out was the dragon. which was enough to get a render, but when compositing them I wasnt really sure how to go about it. I basically cropped half of one picture and then stuck it on top of the other, which left a blatant vertical line down the middle of the picture where theres a subtle shift in tones. Im sure i went about the process in a completely crude amateur way. Will have to look into this more....


and i see there is a way of rendering shadows in their own alpha channel involving switching off primary visibility and using the use background shader... again... much to explore.

update

just experimenting some more with extending the image. Been looking over some photoshop tutorials so have been wanting the practice...

and further still...

I added a ship to the left side of the picture.

is the focus of this picture meant to be on the creature, ship or the lion you have in the sky?

the light on the ship needs something done to it (not sure what though) because it looks somewhat out of place

damn it. you spotted the face in the sky! thats been bugging me as ive been working . im planning on cloning it out when i get back to working in that area.

as for the focus, the idea thats formed in my head for some reason , is of a (dont laugh!) dragon market. so the focus, will be the proccesion coming from the ship, which includes , and culminates with, the main dragon . i am thinking of adding one or two more, and have them tied together as if being led, cattle like, tomarket.

oh i thought that was on purpose...
you have three faces in the sky..
mufasa, a kermit the frog bear-like cartoon face and a warrior all looking ominously down at the evil trading ship (although the frog is smiling...)
change the frog into something more serious like the other two looking angrily at the ship and you've got yourself omnisient (can't spell) beings who look down at the cruel traders and think bad things :)

also, the tip of the dragon's tail looks a bit too square and so it looks like its been cut off (dunno if there was a tip to the tail and your camera setup just cut it off)

yeah i think you shoud be able to pull off that scene of a dragon market. it does sound all blackmarket/underground stuff anmd with that ship there it just looks like it is blackmarket trading :)

I had thought about leaving the mustafa one in, make it look like id been a bit clever, accentuate some features, but i think it clutters. I can see all 3 now. Damn it man, usually thats what i do... see faces in everything!!

All the files for the ship, obj's, texture maps etc, I saved in a folder called 'slaveship', so its definitely got that stamped in my mind.

And, yes, the tail, as the tip of the wing, are near the end of a very weighty do-list.

Unfortunately, im still looking for ways to expand the picture further. I can see this stretching on for quite some time:confused:

I think the image looks interesting it reminds me of that michael jackson clip with that rollercoaster thing can't remember what it was called however...

Finally an image that isn't about golden ratio's or proportions just something the maker came up with.

lovely:beer:

I'm trying soo hard to see those faces you guys are on about but I just can't lol . Unless its those repeats in the top and center. I think the pixel aspect ratio might be off though, the image seems a bit squashed now.

I was going to make the comments about the 3 faces in the sky to but it looks like I've been beat to it.

bloody faces!!! Ive spent hours on this, and everyones commenting on the bits that arent supposed to be there:headbang: :p

ha ha...


I would circle them out for you genny, but Ive cloned them out now (although Im sure someone will find another!) Two are a bit hard to spot, but mustafa, heres right there, all in a quadrant of his own...! Think 'The Lion King'