Website

Hey folks,

I've been using blogger for a while now but I wanted more control over my webpages so will be using my website for most of my updates. I know lazy right! just 2 blogs and I can't bother to update both of them.

Well maybe I will but for now I have been putting effort into my main site:

WWW.JEREMYROBERTORTIZ.COM

I'm currently using wordpress and I have copied all of the post from this blog to the new one.

Thanks
-j-b0t

Likeness sculpt WIP

 Hey folks,

So I worked on a likeness sculpt today of a friend of mine. I have attached a video hopefully the link works. I used Zbrush's new lightbox feature to do some textureing, wow. it makes the photo textureing a breeze I can't begin to explain but it cuts out so many steps and lets you mod and adjust your working images on the fly.

Still tons of work to do on this but I wanted to capture some of my work. sadly the first part of the sculpting process was lost to the glitch monster that lurks in all computers. but I got a good chunk of the work captured. I even tested out putting a voice over on this one as a test. worked out OK.



that's all I have for now.

-J-B0t

BadWolf

Hey Folks,

I have been working  a few things I pulled out an old project and did some touchup work on it with the new Z4. The BestRenderPreview BPR has some cool settings for creating a depth of field effect and I really love the new move elastic brush. not much to report but here are some pics of what I have been working on.

This is an old mesh I decided to pose up. While making thin areas on the ear lobes, I used the move elastic brush, its something like a combination of smoothing and the move brush that adjusts the mesh as your deform it, its awkward at first because of the way the surface moves while evening out mesh, but it made short work of getting a smooth and even mesh distribution.

 This is a test of GoZ, the software bridge from Zbrush to other 3D applications. So far so good, the combination of GoZ and 3dsmax node based material editor made it really east to set up a SSS+Displacement shader network. being able to  modify a mesh in whichever software you see fit with just a click of a button is a dream come true for me.




Well that's all I have for now

-J-B0t

Zbrush 4.0

I just got my Download of Zbrush 4.

Installed it and all I can say is

WOW!!!!!

honestly that is all I can say I'm entirelly to busy installing plugins and testing out the new featuers. I will try and post a video if I can.

-J-B0t

Scorpion Project

Hey folks,


I started a new project this week. Its a scorpion, I just wanted to make something organic that wasn't totally in the world of fiction so I figured a scorpion has all the 'monster' elements and has a need for zbrush with all the cool surface details.

I decided to try and record all my work on this project. I have 2 screen cap videos of my work. The basic forms took me just a few hours I use Zspheres to create the base mesh. but the real work is in the surface details, the main pincers are worked up to a reasonable level lots more to go. have a look
Thanks
-J-B0t

Here are some WIP shots. Rendered in Max with Mental Ray. the model on the right is just the base mesh with no detail maps.

Lighting set up

Hey Folks,

So I got my hands on a copy of Maya2010, and i wanted to give it a test run. well things didn't go to well on that front. I had read an article called 'Making it look real' on Zbrush central forums, and it detailed some lighting setups to as the name implies make your renders look like real objects. Well the set up instructions were for Maya and I wanted to try it. well it was a mess because I still can't get good displacement results with maya, that was part of the reason I uninstalled Maya2009. So not to be discouraged I tried to replicated teh settings in Max using Mental Ray, here a few test renders to make my current Guinea pig 'The Nose' look like a 'Real' plastic toy.

 I cut off the head and feet a little bit but the overall effect I think is decent.

Thanks
 -j-b0t

New Nose

Hey Folks,

So I had some technical issues getting 'The Nose' to render in max.
1. I has problems with surface deformation I was getting strange artifacts on the surface.
2. I couldn't quite get the MR fast skin SSS material shader to  give the back surface lighting that glow it should have.
3. My texture maps weren't lining up with the displacement.

I think I have this wave of bugs out of the render.

     First was getting the displacement to render with some level of detail that was respectable. It the first version of 'The Nose' I used ZBrush's SculptHD, feature, and had a very small base mesh (200ish polys) it displaced the basic form but I didn't get any of the 'HD' details and this seemed like an issue to me. No matter how far I pushed the mesh with TurboSmooth or surface tessellation I had none of the details that were sculpted in Zbrush. After doing some research and some posts on pixologic ZBrush Central, gathered this, The way that ZBrush scans model when making a displacement map has its limits. it seems that you can't use a Map that is too big for the size of your model's poly count. or Zbrush will try to 'up sample' the data from the scan to fit it on a bigger map, basically stretching out the image to a larger size. Because there isn't enough raw data to fill the map this 'up-sampling' effects the smoothness of the grey scale gradients and gives that gagged effect that I was seeing in the first renders. I was using a 4k map, when I switched to a 2K map all the issues of that nature stopped.
     
I did more research on MR Fast Skin SSS Material and I discovered an important thing. that is a little setting called "Scale conversion factor" under Advanced options. This slider effects the way that rays interact with the mesh and the materiel to create the subdermal scattering. I don't know all the technical details but if its too high or too low for your model size you will not get the Back Surface lighting to look good. I had to

As I mentioned I was working with a very small base mesh that was created by zSpheres, I'm not sure if this was a contributing factor to all my problems or to the fact that the Maps were not lining up with the displacement or not but, I decided to ReMesh the whole model and have a larger base polycount. when doing the ReMesh I lost the HD information, but this was ok so I pushed the basic mesh from 900k/125million HD polys to a normal Mesh of 11.5millon polys. After the ReMesh, I Re-sculpted some parts on the model ot get more detail after I SubDivied to the higher mesh. After these changes,  the Alignment of the maps was not an issue anymore and everything lined up perfectly. SculptHD is still suspect but I have to do more tests to know for sure.

 Here is 'The Nose' with test maps for: Non-scatter diffuse, Specular strength and top epidermal layer scatter maps.

I tested out a few version of the Maps with different colors and settings. For: top epidermal  layer and subdermal scattering, Specular strength and  maps







Same Material settings  different camera:

I really pushed the color into the cracks to make sure that the texture maps were lining up with the displacement maps. The nose itself has high specular regions I muted the Spec  just about everywhere else.

I was trying to recreate the soft pink of my cats nose.









Thanks,
-J-B0t