Thursday, June 17, 2010

Getting Mooned!

So I finally got around to building my Moon in Zbrush. It all started in Lightwave 3D first. It was just a simple sphere that I exported as an OBJ model. Once in ZBrush, I loaded it and tried to add Moon dimples with displacement effects - but I forgot the steps for this kind of thing. What threw me off the most was how different the Mac version of ZBrush 3.12 was compared to the version that I learned last summer - on the PC!

I wanted to keep the flow going, and not stop and read how to do it. I ended up using a preset ZBrush Sphere! Sometimes we can make things so complicated. I had what I wanted about 15 minutes later - just the mesh. This is where things got more interesting. . .


Painting the Moon surface was pretty straight forward. I clicked on a few buttons, got prompted with some helpful tips from ZBrush and finally activated the painting tool. Somewhere between painting and exporting, I managed to assign and re-assign UVs! I didn't want to repaint the mesh on the new UVs. I figured I would mess with it in Lightwave.


I was having trouble matching my new texture to the Moon UVs. It was off - way off! I remembered that I had to flip it, but I flipped it all over the place. In Photoshop, I flipped it vertically, horizontally, rotated 90 cw, 180 cw - I had at least 4 or 5 versions saved! I think I made/initiated UVs twice. I couldn't figure it out. I ended up not using the UVs and I did a simple "old school" spherical projection in Lightwave. I added a reference null so I could rotate the texture and position it in real-time. It worked - finally!

So I placed it in the scene. The textureeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee was too pixelated. I should have exported the texture as a 2048 x 2048 map. Next, I will show some of the problems I had with the image in Photoshop and how I fixed it. (oops, time to go to sleep) Goodnight.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Catching up on some Zzz

ZBrush that is. Seems like there is never enough time.

My friend Gaurav Mathur came up with the idea to learn some 3D apps together. The apps were Modo or ZBrush. We chose ZBrush. We would help each other with tips and techniques from our own projects. What a great idea!

My first attempt will be to model a 3D Moon - a classic cheese moon. (As we all know, the moon is made of cheese.) It's a re-visit - again - from my little ghost project found here.

I never finished it, so I wanted to finish the roof and possibly add more detail to the house. I also wanted to redo the lighting and make the moon more interesting. Here is a render of the lighting changes:

I've already updated the roof, and the next step is to tackle the moon. . .