Art of Sammy D

Most 3D artists would agree the creating solid UVWs is critical, but also sucks balls. For me personally, anyway that I can get decent UVs created in the fast possible time is a winner!

If you are working with Zbrush and 3ds Max this workflow is fast and can be useful for a lot of situations.

1 - GoZ
Make sure your GoZ is setup between Zbrush and Max and make sure it is working correctly so you can freely send meshes between the two software packages.

2 - Setup Seams
Zbrush's UV Master is awesome at unwrapping meshes with little or no UV distortion. Where is fails is creating seams in the right places! You can use the control painting options, but I find this barely works at directing where the seams will be. So the best option for seams is in Max.

Import your low poly mesh into Max and apply a UVW Unwrap modifier. Then create the seams in the places that you would like. E.g. inside of the legs of a character model or any 'unseen' places. Once the seam are created you can just select the whole model an 'quick peel' this will create some UV islands, but the UVs will be distorted...but thats ok because we'll get Zbrush to unwrap for us.

3 - UV Master in Zbrush
Use GoZ to send the Max mesh with the seams back into Zbrush. From there open UV master and ensure you have 'Use existing seams' on. Click unwrap and your done, if you flatten the model in Zbrush you will see it has nicely unwrapped the model using all the seams you setup in Max!

4 - Pack the UVWs
You could be happy with the process at step 3, but if you want to arrange the UV islands for painting textures etc, simply GoZ the mesh back to max, apply the UVW Unwrap modifier, open the UV editors and arrange the islands as required. Job done!

So this obviously isn't going to get 100% perfect UVs and some 'purists' would say you need to unwrap all the UVs in Max or other unwrap package to ensure perfect UVs with zero distortion.

But for most situations this is a great fast workflow that yields decent results.

Happy UV'ing!

First post for 2016!

Late last year I spend quite a bit of time in Unity and modelling some pow poly chars which I will post at some stage.

I lost a bit of motivation and inspiration so I moved onto some character concept work in Zbrush. I wanted to build something quite alien this time and I blocked out a sort of scorpion character which I think turned out well for a quick sculpt.

I've since scrapped this concept and gone with a new variation which I feel has a better impact.

I've enjoy not rushing this initial part and really taking the time to find a base that I like. It is liberating to scrap one idea and move down another path!

Here are some shots of the scorpion char and this is as far as it will go.

Managed to put in some solid time over the past couple weeks to finish this one off. I'm actually really happy with how this one turned out. I definitely feel I've improved a lot in a few areas. Always learning though, never 100% satisfied, but great to call another image done.

Workflow
Sculpting and poly-painting in Zbrush, modelling, shaders in 3dsmax and rendered in Vray. Post production in Photoshop

Things I like
I think the number one thing I like most about this project is the rendering and lighting. I went for a brighter image and used HDRI image based lighting. Definitely helped add some life to the character. My Zbrush to 3ds Max workflow is much smoother now, especially in the areas of normal maps and displacement.

Things I Dislike
Some of the smaller objects shaders and textures are not very polished, I also don't particularly like the glass shader used on the windows, I think that could have been improved. I also had issues with 3ds max hair and fur and had to resort to straight fibermesh export for the beard, but I actually think it looks ok.

Things I Learnt
Lighting would be the number one area I feel I improved. Also the SSS skin shader is also the best one I have done yet!.

Next i'm going to do some more low-poly art and work on a Unity project for a while. No doubt another character render will be on the cards at some stage.

Heres the final image.

Slowly found some time to work for on my Gnome character. I had some instability issues with Zbrush when I was trying to apply various surface noise on the hat, so I ended up going with texture based bump and displacement.

I'm now about 1/4 the way through the texturing and shaders so hopefully another update really soon.

The idea for my next image came to me from a few different points of inspiration. One part came from the mother of one of my step-daughters friends bought us a small hairy gnome ornament, it intrigued me as it had a lot of hair and a beard and its hat covered its eyes. Another part of inspiration came from chatting to some mates at the pub who were talking about living in a giant hat..all very bizarre I know! Ultimately the idea was born, I wanted to create an interesting gnome character that had a village or house in his large hat! Lets see how it turns out.

Heres a couple of WIP screens.

Building a base mesh in Zbrush.

Creating some clothes in 3ds Max.

I've been working on and off on this character for quite a number of months. I've called it done on 31st December 2014.

I feel like i'm always saying i've 'learnt a lot' doing this project. But I really have learnt a lot! From sharping up the displacement workflow, to experimenting a lot more with shaders and Vray render settings. So ultimately I think I've improved in a number of areas, but still so much more to learn and try.

I'm going to try something new to accompany my completed images, a small summary of things I've points I like, points I dislike and things I have learnt.

I'm next project will be something a little less intense and hopefully a bit more 'fun loving'. Keen to spend some time sculpting in Zbrush again!

Things I like

I'm happy with my displacement workflow this time around and I feel I can now get decent quality displacement maps out of Zbrush and rendered in 3DS Max Vray

I'm also happy with some of the shader work in the this project. Especially spent a lot of time working with the SSS2 shader for the skin.

Things I Dislike

Hair! Hair was definitely a challenge and I spent a lot of time testing different work flows for hair. In this project I settled with a mix of 3ds Max Hair & Fur modifier and also exported Zbrush Fibermesh.

The character also has very little hair because I was not happy with any other hair styles I came up with.

I also had trouble with post production again and still couldn't get multiple render elements to work as layers in Photoshop or After Effects. I also find that by that stage of a project i'm usually ready to move on. I'll need to do some more research in this area.

Things I Learnt

I learnt a lot about Vray in this project and many different render settings and parameters and how they effect the final look. I also spent a lot more time playing with shaders and textures.

I've called this post 'Cheap Hair & Fur' for the simple fact that creating decent hair systems in various cgi packages generally involves purchasing some pricey addon. E.g. HairFarm.

While i'm sure these addons make life easier I wanted to experiment with some workflows that used some of the inbuilt tools available in the software packages I use already. That being Zbrush and 3ds Max.

In the past I have experimented with Zbrushes fibermesh. This can get some pretty cool results and I love that you can polypaint straight onto the fiber.

Basically the Fibermesh workflow involves masking areas of your mesh from where you would like the fiber/hair to grow and then using the various 'grooming' brushes to style the hair. This is the area in which is lacking, the styling. The grooming brushes seem to be a brute force styling process which doesn't allow to much control. You are also stuck to rendering your Fibermesh in Zbrush.

One tip i'd like to share for fiber mesh is to split your desired hairline into multiple polygroups to help with the styling process, much how real hair grows.

Here is an example of grouping the mesh in preparation for growing Fibermesh.

Now the next hair workflow I have been experimenting with is the native Hair and Fur modifier in 3ds Max. I must say I've never explored this in detail because I had read, more than once, that it is not worth any time. But I must say its actually a fairly robust system.

For one, you can render it in either Mental Ray or Vray my renderer of choice. The styling tools are very handy and have lots of options to tweak your hair to get the style and look you want. And you can also apply specialized Vray materials to the hair. The speed of the renders during my testing were also quite decent.

If you are rendering a hi-poly model in 3ds max I recommend creating a low poly proxy as the mesh to which you will 'grow' the hair. I found using the free form poly tools and drawing a low poly mesh over the hi-poly model a good way to work. This makes it easy to adjust the hairline as well.

Once the hairline base has been created we can apply the Hair and Fur modifier. Using the styling tools i found it relatively easy to get a hair style I was happy with. Its not perfect but with a bit of playing around you can get some cool styles. Parameters such as Hair Tip and Root thickness and Hair Count will play a big part in how the rendered hair looks. You can also use the extra features such as Flyaway to get a more realistic look. I suggest playing with them all. See my settings below.

Here is what the hairline mesh looks like with the styled Hair and Fur modifier applied in the view port.

Finally, as I am rendering in Vray I applied a Vray material to the Hair and Fur modifier. This greatly helps speed up the render time. I used the VRayHairMtl as the base shader and I applied the VrayHairInfoTex map to the transmission_texture slot to give some variance in the hair shader, otherwise all the hairs would look the same.

Here are the settings I used for the VrayHairInfoTex. Basically this will blend between two colours along the strand of each hair. Adjusting the bias parameter will affect the distance before the blend. Again experimenting with various settings can produce vastly different results.

And here is a test render of the Hair and Fur on my model.

Art of Sammy D

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