Venus faun and a fish

[michalis]

Its a new project I'm working on. This may help me understand all the problems and learn something. The faun the fish-like and the head of the girl were sculpted in 3dc. The rest of the nude in blender (old box modeling, colored groups etc. It was more simple to set the pose this way. I had to edit auto-topology in blender, so to check ngones etc. The whole composition in zbrush4, rendering too. Now starting details, the faun first. I copied the pose of the nude only.

[LJB]

Beautiful!!

[moska]

Hi Man

hope to see that sculptures of yours, in the British Museum one day.

[michalis]

Thanks LJB, moska, not in the British Museum of course. Maybe in the new Acropolis museum, a more virtual place there

Some thought about greek gods. They look more like function of the human existence to me, not real gods I mean. Its easier to do some nice compositions this way. Aphrodite is not a woman, its only a silly and beautiful girl. As for the faun and the fish you can guess.

[Tony Nemo]

Fine work as we have come to expect. Will the faun get his corkscrew? Is Venus a little husky? In this pose, she looks more like a boy.

[michalis]

Thanks Tony Nemo, its a WIP after all, now I'm working on the faun. Have a look here, aphrodite was never a thin girl. Lot of work in front.

[michalis]

This time new auto-retopo worked. I spent half an hour to fix all n-gones and other problems though in blender but I'm impressed. I could retopo this manually in half an hour but its OK. What some people are refusing to understand in this forum is why I need a precise topology for sculpting static models. Well, sculpture is more topology than anatomy, this is my opinion.

A 3k model (all quads) imported in zbrush. I had to export a decimated tri version from voxel room too so to re-project all on the quad mesh. This is the only stable way to have lo poly multi-res exports from 3DC.

Please, a n-gones or tris indicator!

[michalis]

I'm impressed with the new 3DC build. Here testing it, millions of poly in voxel room for the mac user. At last. Great performance.

A 3DC render here just for fun, a multi pass export.

[PalSan]

Very good! Excellent material and light Depth of field adds to the realism of the work

[bantu]

I'm flattered by the quality of your work! The icing on the cake is the nice marble shading. And hey I get why you do retopo for static moels: who can stand messy edgeflow on a finished piece?! But otherwise if it EVER gets animated (we've senn moving sculptures in films already) you're already ahead of the pack with nice edgeflow.

cheers!

[michalis]

thanks palsan. bantu

Testing the last 3DC build, now I'm really impressed because its the first time that I used autoetopo (OK some fixes but not much), I used 3dc for UVs, I baked normal maps at 2048, I exported the topo mesh at 8k and a high res tri mesh (1M) from retopo room. Combined them in blender (cage technic or reproject or shrinkwrap ) . So here is a multi-res model, seams are invisible now. A 3DC only model. Thanks to Andrew.

[michalis]

Just a thought about this fine library. What I don't understand is that we can't merge them in surface mode too or even in paint-sculpt room directly. Some boolean actions are not possible there but these objects have a fine topology already and could have UVs too. Just to paint and export. Of course I can import them directly to another app (blender in my case).

So lets say, do some conceptual sketch in voxels room, then import them in a more suitable hardface modeler. To retopo all these is not the best. Especially when a whole machine is the merged object.

Lot of possibilities though. I'm in love with the new 3DC. Even I can't practically work in more than 8M resolution (as a mac 32 bit user). But its OK

Here some funny thing as I was demonstrating the new 3DC to a friend last night.

[michalis]

BTW here some rocks for SketchUp. Less than 20k. Modeled with some merging technic, retopo and painting. I found rocks particular difficult because they tend have a smooth lay out, not the best for this case. Auto-retopo didn't help me either for the same reason. But manually wasn't hard at all. Rendered using podium (clone of Kray render for SU)

[Rich_Art]

That looks very nice. Was it not hard to retopo this?? I can imagine it is.

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[michalis]

Thanks Rich_art, rocks are not hard at all for retopo, similar to hard faces without the need of precision. Just some denser loops here and there. As not for animation (lol) even some tris are acceptable. The autoretopo didn't help as tending to have a smoother layout. It took 30 min anyway, UV islands editing included.

[Rich_Art]

Ok. Thanks. It came out nice..

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[michalis]

This is a low poly version of one of the rocks. Less than 3K tris. Auto-retopo but I edited it a lot. I used a seamless texture on a voxels material, this was the base to paint more layers on it. Low poly rocks tend to come out smoother than it should, I had to paint a short of details there. These models have to work with apps- renders that don't support normal maps. (Kray renderer). Unfortunately, bumps only. I also baked AO and also cavity for bumps in blender (better control), using a high poly mesh for reference.

[michalis]

Another rock study. At 6k, retopo and painted.

[Rich_Art]

some nice rocks. Texture could have been rougher I think.

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[michalis]

@rich-art: thanks, right, I'll use a different bump map though, here is the 3dc render. These Sketch Up renderers like kray don't support normal_maps. I have to bake some sort of cavity map to use as bump. This trick works. Is there a way to paint or bake a cavity map in 3DC? any ideas? AO map is not for this job.

[michalis]

Used zbrush for cavity baking and decimation only. A Kray clone render. 3DC rocks

I exported the hi tri poly reference from voxels room and combined it with the already baked and painted re-topo (project all). The hi density microvertex export is broken, sorry.

[Rich_Art]

that looks great... Which app for rendering did you used?

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[michalis]

thanks richard or rich art. I alredy mentioned this. Its "podium V2" a Kray clone that run in SketchUp. I'm a beta tester there. Not many capabilities (no normal maps) but what a lighting. I'm impressed. In 1 min.

[Rich_Art]

Thanks for the info. I use Vray and C4D so it was more a "I wanna know" question.

It is Rich_Art. My name is René Rijk. Rijk = Rich in English and Art speaks for itself. So Rich_Art it is.

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[herve_bis]

Great work.. I like the faun a lot..

[michalis]

Thanks hervé.

Here's a kind of tutorial on rocks and 3DC.

I was playing, I used copy tool, I constructed some obj for merge, you know it was fun and great. But when coming to re-topology? Its hard.

But quads don't really help rocks modeling, these are static objects not for animation.

1. I used a 4x proxy of the rock first.

2. Exported a decimated version from voxels palette (always export scene) ~22k

3. I imported it re-topo room as a topo objected and snapped it to reference voxel model. I already had return to the original voxel not the proxy!

4. I did some UVs and baked it. I checked first for snapping related problems on difficult parts, I found just one mess and edited it a bit.

Why not? Finished hi detailed rocks (~ 22k). What do you think? Please some comments. I may be wrong?

I just have to complain to Andrew about the materials in voxels. Why they come so lighter when baked? Even with 0 contrast. Without specularity.

The first from the left is the ~6M voxel, the second is the 22k.

[michalis]

Just because I had nothing else to do this evening, a fast study on a Egyptian head. A hard surface like approach in one hour.

[Rich_Art]

wow cool model.

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[artman]

Nice Study here! Hope you do more of those.

Egyptian sculpts are surely a completely thing to study,probably very different maths behind than Mayan or Greek sculpture.

[michalis]

Thanks Rich_Art, artman,

Egyptian sculpts are surely a completely thing to study,probably very different maths behind than Mayan or Greek sculpture.

Egyptian sculpts is a great study, first of all we learn that anatomy is definitely not the key for serious sculpture. As for maths, Egypt is Euclides, athenian sculptors - Feidias - are rather elliptical or even fractal. Mayan... who knows... 2012 is coming. What is exiting for me is that these Egyptian sculpts are so old... 3500 -5000 years ago. They stand on earth, greek look rather flying. There is a lot of people that believes that a sculpt of Michelangelo is superior. Just imagine one of his masterpieces aside an Egyptian one. I bet you wont even seen it. I mean, after some time it will start disappearing. Magic? or just Art?

But there is this dancer girl of Degas, this is so close to ancient sculpture, weird ... the time machine. Giacometti...

We're trying to develop our skills and technics here... I'm wondering, maybe we should try the opposite.