Claw-Snake : ZBrush model and testing bones within SSS
Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 7:17 pm
Ok, this is not actually a WIP since I'm finished with it, but since it's just a test of how SSS works when there is a skeleton inside I decided to post it in this section.
Comments and Crit's is of course still welcome since it might help me in future projects.
This was a way for me to refresh my knowledge of Zbrush and Maxwell after a long vacation from rendering.
My Shatzia project kind of died when a newer version of ZBrush came...plenty of goodies I wanted to use, but suddenly a 200m high ZB sculpt wasn't as easy to rescale correctly. (a plugin for ZB was replaced with new functionality and I never figured out how to get the same result
)
Also intentionally the simplest scene possible: Creature, flat grey ground, two planar backlight emitters and one planar frontal fill light emitter.
The simple skeleton part and the fleshpart created in ZBrush 3.5 R3:
It's about 10-20cm high.
Originally it was just going to be a finger to test SSS on, but I had fun with ZSpheres and ZSketch and ended up with another Evolution-Mistake
Also created Displacement map and Occlusion map with ZBrush. Occlusion map was only used in the skin-like render just to darken the skin texture a bit.
Original idea for fleshmaterial:
It's Maxwell's Jade-material with slightly higher internal roughness and of course, red color instead of green.
This was rendered at 3000x2002 (without the Multilight option), and reached this result, SL 9 in 1h.
No noice reduction was used here. Vignetting added with AdobeCameraRaw.
( memory usage by Maxwell was < 2Gb )
Just testing with a little more skin-like material (yes, this creature has dry rubber skin, it would have looked better if I had spent some time on making a specular-map
) :
The original render was 4000x2669, and since I also wanted to test Maxwells Multilight-Color functionality, Maxwell used 10Gb of memory during render.... getting 24Gb of memory for my new computer was worth the extra money!
Rendered over night, reached SL 12.5 in 14h25min. Used PhotoshopCS4's Filter-Noice-Dust&Scratches (rad.2 , thres.17) to remove the tiny bright red SSS dots that you get when using this type of material/lighting and don't let it cook longer. ( I know from other threads that HDRI is recommended instead of emitters but wanted to test MultilightColor )
Slight post-crop Vignette added with AdobeCameraRaw.
At first I intended to do the above Multilight Color render at the same resolution as my camera (5D Mk II, 5616x3744).
Ok, it would have worked, Maxwell used 16Gb of my available 24Gb, but then I made a mistake. I wanted to see how large the mxi file was during render and browsed to the folder...not knowing that when thumbnails are shown in explorer, explorer ( I'm guessing ) uses Maxwell to generate a thumbnail?
So suddenly explorer wanted about 16Gb of memory too.... that didn't go too well
( no response from any opened softwares, including taskmanager, only the mouse worked, but extremely sluggish )
Did a Power off shutdown since I didn't want to wait and see if Win7 would ever finish with the preview...and before starting the render again I lowered the resolution slightly just to be safe ( I wasn't 100% sure that Maxwell wouldn't increase it's memory usage during render....turned out that it didn't)
The fullsize renders can be found here (most are > 2000x2000), also some other pics where I used multilight to turn off some of the lights and adjust intensity/color :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsmagnus ... 97/detail/
EDIT: 7 Aug 2010
Decided to spend another day on this creature.(previous skin-render was too crappy
Texture was created by polypainting in ZBrush combined with traditional texture work in Photoshop.
Used a modified version of the texture as specularity map, so now it has a dry skinsurface but with wetness between the "fingers".
Only rendered Multilight with option to change the Intensity, not color, and then it only used 2.7Gb of memory for a 4496x3000 render.
I also tweaked the SubSurfaceScatter in this material and now I got almost no bright red SSS dots....so apparantly the previous skin render suffered from "User-Incompetence"
I let this "cook" in Maxwell during the night, and it reached this stage, SL 12, in 8h45min.
However, it looked rather good just after one hour! ( SL 6 )
Highres versions of these (3000x3000) also available here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsmagnus ... 97/detail/
Comments and Crit's is of course still welcome since it might help me in future projects.
This was a way for me to refresh my knowledge of Zbrush and Maxwell after a long vacation from rendering.
My Shatzia project kind of died when a newer version of ZBrush came...plenty of goodies I wanted to use, but suddenly a 200m high ZB sculpt wasn't as easy to rescale correctly. (a plugin for ZB was replaced with new functionality and I never figured out how to get the same result
)Also intentionally the simplest scene possible: Creature, flat grey ground, two planar backlight emitters and one planar frontal fill light emitter.
The simple skeleton part and the fleshpart created in ZBrush 3.5 R3:
It's about 10-20cm high.
Originally it was just going to be a finger to test SSS on, but I had fun with ZSpheres and ZSketch and ended up with another Evolution-Mistake
Also created Displacement map and Occlusion map with ZBrush. Occlusion map was only used in the skin-like render just to darken the skin texture a bit.
Original idea for fleshmaterial:
It's Maxwell's Jade-material with slightly higher internal roughness and of course, red color instead of green.
This was rendered at 3000x2002 (without the Multilight option), and reached this result, SL 9 in 1h.
No noice reduction was used here. Vignetting added with AdobeCameraRaw.
( memory usage by Maxwell was < 2Gb )
Just testing with a little more skin-like material (yes, this creature has dry rubber skin, it would have looked better if I had spent some time on making a specular-map
) :The original render was 4000x2669, and since I also wanted to test Maxwells Multilight-Color functionality, Maxwell used 10Gb of memory during render.... getting 24Gb of memory for my new computer was worth the extra money!
Rendered over night, reached SL 12.5 in 14h25min. Used PhotoshopCS4's Filter-Noice-Dust&Scratches (rad.2 , thres.17) to remove the tiny bright red SSS dots that you get when using this type of material/lighting and don't let it cook longer. ( I know from other threads that HDRI is recommended instead of emitters but wanted to test MultilightColor )
Slight post-crop Vignette added with AdobeCameraRaw.
At first I intended to do the above Multilight Color render at the same resolution as my camera (5D Mk II, 5616x3744).
Ok, it would have worked, Maxwell used 16Gb of my available 24Gb, but then I made a mistake. I wanted to see how large the mxi file was during render and browsed to the folder...not knowing that when thumbnails are shown in explorer, explorer ( I'm guessing ) uses Maxwell to generate a thumbnail?
So suddenly explorer wanted about 16Gb of memory too.... that didn't go too well
( no response from any opened softwares, including taskmanager, only the mouse worked, but extremely sluggish )
Did a Power off shutdown since I didn't want to wait and see if Win7 would ever finish with the preview...and before starting the render again I lowered the resolution slightly just to be safe ( I wasn't 100% sure that Maxwell wouldn't increase it's memory usage during render....turned out that it didn't)
The fullsize renders can be found here (most are > 2000x2000), also some other pics where I used multilight to turn off some of the lights and adjust intensity/color :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsmagnus ... 97/detail/
EDIT: 7 Aug 2010
Decided to spend another day on this creature.(previous skin-render was too crappy
Texture was created by polypainting in ZBrush combined with traditional texture work in Photoshop.
Used a modified version of the texture as specularity map, so now it has a dry skinsurface but with wetness between the "fingers".
Only rendered Multilight with option to change the Intensity, not color, and then it only used 2.7Gb of memory for a 4496x3000 render.
I also tweaked the SubSurfaceScatter in this material and now I got almost no bright red SSS dots....so apparantly the previous skin render suffered from "User-Incompetence"
I let this "cook" in Maxwell during the night, and it reached this stage, SL 12, in 8h45min.
However, it looked rather good just after one hour! ( SL 6 )
Highres versions of these (3000x3000) also available here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larsmagnus ... 97/detail/
It changes the images that we used to see here.
