STC#17 - June 8 - June 15 - Thorns

[Craig Lewis]

Texture maps

I spent the first hour in ZBrush, I used mainly the rake tool, this worked fantastically for the surface texture. Once I was happy with that, I then baked the normal map in 3ds max, as well as heightmap, a AO map, etc, and combined them all together in photoshop to give me a flat grey base texture. The rest of my time was then spent colouring in that, and arsing about with different colours.

[Sentientv2]

Awesome job Craig. Mind telling me how you get your normal maps so sharp in Zbrush? I don't imagine it is that hard I just haven't had a ton of experience with it. Mine seem to come out dull. Also what division level do you work at? I think mine was on 6 when I did mine. I'll upload it now and then give this another shot. Looks awesome though!

[Craig Lewis]

I only worked at subdivision level 5 when doing this. As for the normal maps sharpness, I load it up into photoshop, duplicate the layer, then set it to overlay. This seems to do the job pretty well.

[Sentientv2]

I think I'm just having a horrible time with Maya's Hardware Renderer. It really seems to diminish the sharpness of the image when you compare it to High Quality mode in the viewport. Maya is also playing some bizarre trick that I believe has been diagnosed as Nvidia driver issues that cause a slightly transparent mesh. I've checked my textures a million times and all of the alpha settings I could find. I don't believe I'm doing anything wrong.

Here's a comparison shot. The left is the high quality viewport. The right is hardware render. My fiance likes the one on the right. I think the one on the left looks much sharper and detailed and realistic.


I'm going to have to do another one. This was my second try on this competition. I tried to do an ambient occlusion render this time around and it easily took 25 minutes to do a 2048 render. Total time was most likely over 2 hours. I just heard about xNormal and I'm going to work with it from now on and see how it works with my normals and ao maps. I've seen the results it produces and they look great. I'd switch to Max if I really had that much time to get myself to the same level as I'm at in Maya, but right now that isn't feasible. I'll probably switch if someone pays me to learn it.

[myles]

You need to change your render settings in the filter to gauge or something like that, but just change it from Triangle.

[Sentientv2]

You're referring to a setting within Mental Ray, Multi-pixel filtering. I'm using Maya Hardware. I did mess with Mental Ray, but I heard Ben Clark scalding someone one time for using anything other than Maya Hardware because it wasn't representative of what a game engine would produce. He's right, so I'm trying to do it the hardware renderer way. We'll see.

Edit: Just to note though, I guess the stars aligned and Mental Ray was producing an image as close as I've gotten to the High Quality. I'll redo everything within two hours and turn it in when I have time.

Thanks for the suggestion myles.

[kingpin]

i imported into z-brush and sculpted to make a hipoly which i spent about 45 mins and then imported the hi poly and low poly into x-normal to create the normal map.i then painted the the texture in photoshop using base colours and then applying slightly lighter colour and then distorted the pixels using filters.

[Sentientv2]

Looks good kingpin. My only critique would be the green goo. I love it on the ends of the thorns and I like the veining of it across the plant. I just don't see the two representations of it relating to each other. You'd have to do an AO map to find out where the thorns are on the texture, which I can say it takes too long for this competition.

I'd also think you could really sell the goo sort of the underlayer of the plant by giving the edges of the plant where those veins show a little bit of contrast. It looks a bit flat right now from the bark to the goo and if you had a little bit of a shadow (even putting the goo and bark on different layers and doing a layer style with drop shadow or dark glow) would help give it some dimension.

Really neat all in all. I've got to do my resubmit tomorrow. Hopefully I can bring it all together within two hours. It's been neat to fail twice to be honest. I've learned how to get the process down a bit faster from program to program.

[kingpin]

thanks for that info sentientv, will try and remember for next time. by the way the green goo is supposed look like moss lol, just the way i painted it i guess

[Sentientv2]

I guess it was the saturation of the green and the fact it was on the tips of the of the thorns (sort like blood would be in an iconic sort of way) made me think it was good. I found a good way to put moss gently in a texture was to paste a large texture I had made of seamless moss into a higher layer and then apply a black mask to it. Then I pick an organic shaped brush and gently paint in with white the areas I want affected with the moss. I think I also used a blending mode like color burn as well. The effect was really subtle and very controllable.

I've got to get mine done (again) now and submit it. I highly recommend xNormal for baking AO maps. It is free and about 50-70% faster than Maya was when I made an AO map. The big kicker is that the AO map made with xNormal was from a high poly model and the AO map in Maya was from the low and it still took so much less time.

I wasn't able to get done what I wanted to in 2 hours... yet. I'm going to take a break and give it another shot. I'm dumbfounded when it comes to maya and why it cannot do normal maps worth a crap. They look like bump maps to me when they render out

EDIT: Finally figured out the resolution problems. Maya defaults to putting a Quadratic filter on your texture files. Thank you so much for that Autodesk, . I don't need you blurring up my images. Thanks though.