- ZBrush and Maya – Nordic axe Build
Originally I started modeling out some very small things that i wanted to add to my room scene, as early on i had wanted to fill it up with some small things. I had an idea that i wanted this room to be a log style cabin, and one of the things i had wanted to build in this would fittingly be an axe. Originally i had wanted to build a wood axe, similar to one that i had used while camping, shown below.
I started building a simple small wood axe simply out of some primitive shapes, however i wasn’t that big of a fan on the design, and i ended up giving up for a while.
Later on throughout the semester, i had a friend streaming the 2016 game God of War, a highly detailed 3D world set in a Nordic setting. In the game, the main character uses an Axe called the Leviathan Axe, a large axe intricately that is very intractably made, seen from some images taken from google images below.
I Decided that in line with the log style cabin, i wanted to build an axe similar in shape to this, with a very intricate blade and a wrap around the hilt, i went back into Maya and made a very primitive low poly axe to be used in ZBrush. I originally had considered and looked into using splines in Maya and Importing splines made in illustrator into making designs for the hilt, but decided to do this in ZBrush instead.
I actually ended up redoing the head of the axe close to 5 times as i just couldn’t get something i was happy with, and tweaked a lot of things about the hilt, the way the cloth was wrapped around it and the bottom pieces.
Eventually i had something i was somewhat happy with. I took it into ZBrush and used a combination of Polypaint, Zadd and adding in texture through Alphas to refine the axe a lot more. Below i’ve included a video at 2000x speed of the process to achieve this.
Overall i had a lot of issues with this build. The build was so low poly that a lot of the designs on the axe didn’t really pan out the way i wanted or looked too low poly on the finished mesh. I also should have done each piece separately and then combined them in Maya afterwards however i didn’t. I also only learned halfway through that instead of painting on things, you can Zadd or subtract with RGB On at the same time to raise areas with a different colour, which is what i should have done with the Runes on the Axe. Overall i am happy that i learned some more things in ZBrush and got some practice in using ZBrush and taking models inbetween Maya and Zbrush. as this was a small model that was going to be in a very dimly lit area of my scene, I may not be completely happy with the way the model turned out, but i am happy with how it ended up looking in my scene.
After all this, i felt like my scene was finally complete, and i’m happy with the way it looks now. I Rendered out some stills (After bluescreening my PC due to accidentally setting the samples to 61 instead of 6, always double check render settings) and i plan to hopefully render out some camera animations going through the scene if my PC can handle it later on.
- ZBrush and Maya – Mounted Deer Head
I wanted to make a mounted deer head for my rustic cabin scene as to experiment around with ZBrush. I’d seen that the smoothing and sculpting tools were easy to approach in ZBrush and could make some highly detailed things but when making things before i’d started off with a basic human head shape. I Decided to start off with a basic reference photo from google images and make a geometric low poly deer head.
After this it was just a simple task of adding in edge loops with symmetry and pulling apart polygons until i had a very rough shape of what it was going to be. I did this in an orthographic view port facing head on just to pull apart polygons as i found it easier to do then using a proper spline setup.
After this it was looking fairly good in an orthographic viewport but it had no depth to it on the Z Axis. Using just the perspective view and the soft brush i went about pulling out vertices on the Z Axis and giving it more depth.
It started coming along with adding more edge loops into parts like the horns and pulling out the edges very quickly.
After this the low poly head was done, i got both versions of what it would look like subdivided and polygonal and took it into ZBrush afterwards.
In ZBrush i went about both using the DemStandard cut tools and the move tool to pull apart and smooth the mesh down to get some results that i liked. I focused on deforming both the horns to look a little more organic then before and tweaking the eyes a lot. A lot of the difficulty i found with doing this was finding out the organic shape of what a deer’s head looks like with muscular structure, as all deer have fur covering the skin, and had to deduce through a lot of refrence images what it would look like.
Overall i’m happy with the way it looks now aside from the hole in the mesh that i’ll need to sort out, and may just add some more polys to flesh it out a bit more. Afterwards i’m not concerned on adding texture to the skin as this will be covered with fur and i may do so using Maya’s Bifrost engine.
After working with my professor Nick later on, i managed to fix this small hole in the bottom left of the mesh by closing up the hole using the move tools as much as i could, and then remeshing the subtool. I made sure to go inbetween undoing and redoing this to get the hole closed while still trying to keep the mesh as detailed as possible, as remeshing at a high level destroyed all detail. I let the project lay dormant after a while as i had some other things i needed doing, and then came back into the project after revisiting some of the ZBrush work from Week 5. I used the polypaint to make a very simple colour outline, and then decided to record the rest, using a combination of different colours in painting, smoothing the colours together, adding in textures via alphas, going back and subdiving the mesh more to get better detail on the alphas, and overall making the deer look much better.
Below is the process of doing this at over 2500x speed.
After this the deer was finshed, after being subdivided at around 5 million polys. i took this into Maya after using the UV Master tools to create a UV and making a displacement map / texture, after adjusting the bump on the displacement map to not explode all over the place, i realized something was wrong with the actual mesh.
I had some theories as to what was happening, but most of them stemmed from when i began subdividing in the process of creating this in ZBrush, as after remeshing my mesh had lost a lot of polys and when adding in alpha detail i had to divide again. I believe this broke the mesh in a weird way in ZBrush, as after consulting my prof Nick and getting his gracious help, The problem was in fact that ZBrush had broken up the mesh when exporting, which would cause major issues when applying textures and displacement. This was solved by turning off textures and displacements, grouping together all subtools, and then checking using the grid feature inZBrush to make sure the mesh was all in one object. I eventually used this exact process again when creating my Nordic Axe to make certain it would transfer properly into Maya. I imported the Deer into Maya and fixed the bump map once again blowing up even though it looked fairly neat.
After this it was finally done. I imported it into my scene and rendered it out. Overall i learned a fair amount i feel, and got a bit of a better feel about what i should and shouldn’t do when using ZBrush in terms of the workflow and also helped me learn to troubleshoot some issues like things not grouping or holes in a mesh.
I also built a very small plaque for the head to rest on in the scene out of wood in the shape of a pentagon simply using some edge loops and moving them around, though as this was in a dimly lit area in the scene for my room its not as visible
- ZBrush – Week 5 Face build
I started building out the face with a Zbrush primitive, which is very polygonal when starting off and is going to need a lot of work to subdivide and make look like an actual human head.
I did some smoothing and started giving him some actual face shapes but unfortunately he looks a little bit like a goblin.
Afterwards i started tweaking the facial structure, attempting to add face lines and do some things with the eyes as opposed to just having some dented holes in his head and adjusting the blockiness on his neck.
After this i adjusted the eyes giving him eyelids and starting to add in some more facial structure feelings, as at this point it needed some more lines to feel more organic.
After this i got it to a point i liked more, with it having a lot more wrinkles and face creases and somewhat resembling the old man from squid game.
I managed to bring it into Maya and export it, but i’d like to go back at some point and add in some more textures with painting on the face and potentially tweak the brow line / add some facial pores.
I went about using the polypaint tool to then start adding some colour, switching the options on the brush to RGB instead of Zadd, i also made sure to turn on the fast shading in the textures to make sure i was getting the actual colour as opposed to the polyskin texture.
I Started adding colour to the model at this point, trying to use the smoothing tools and using the focal shift to make the paint on the face look somewhat blended together. I also then went about importing some alphas to use as textures on the skin, for the face pores, lips and skin etc.
I Then went about using the UV Master and making some UV’s for my face to be able to put it into Maya, also making a texture map from polypaint, and a displacement map to get the detail of the model when importing it into the scene.
The model imported fine and intact, meaning there were no issues with the mesh, so i went about adding in the displacement map first, turning off quadratic filtering and making sure the colour space was set to RAW for most detail.
However the color balance wasn’t set properly on the displacement shader, as it had no deference between colours and needed to be set with the offset being half the gain. I tweaked it again and accidentally put in an incorrect value and got the complete opposite of the first image that almost kinda looked like an alien.
After fixing this, the model was looking much better.
At this point all that was left was to simply add in the actual colour, and upon doing so, this was the result.
I narrowed down the issue to being that when creating a proper displacement map, i both had saved as a tif file which maya hated, and i also hadn’t set the map to adaptive. However upon trying to fix this, i had ZBrush crash constantly when trying to export. I believe this was due to the number of overall polys, as it was sitting at over 21 million, and even on the lowest subdivision level would still not export. I went about researching ways to get this down using decimation, however potentially due to hardware constraints, even this couldn’t fix the issue, as decimation master would repeatedly crash and even cause hardware issues where half of ZBrush would stop outright with errors of decimation master stopping. However, as i learned the techniques to get there and knew the issues, i decided to use these same exporting techniques for other projects like the deer head i was working on.
A place to store all my VFX work