United3dArtists Archive

I have started to work on scenery for my short animated series called Alkothosk. I production I hope to produce almost entirely on free software principally aimed at pushing TS to the limit and seeing what it REALLY can do, to see if it can cope enough to compete with 3D media today.

I preferable hope to fully test sculpting on my character Krahli, then using a free Normal Map generator, generate normal maps on a low res mesh to animate with, but that will come later. I want to work on something different..

So here is the Asteroid Alkathosk, and a test on sculpting:


Possible free sculpt software: Sculptris, Blender, trueSpace7.61

Blender has powerful sculpt tools, but it looks a little tricky to use. But on the upside, it has sculpt layers and equally powerful sculpt tools.

trueSpace also has some powerful, simple yet useful sculpt tools also, including texture displacement brushes (minus texture stamping and spacing..)

Sculptris seems like the best bet, with auto tesselation, powerful sculpt tools and simplicity and ease of use. unfortunately you can't generate Normal Maps nor sculpt onto a model with a set UV.


Unfortunately none of these are like Mudbox, Zbrush nor 3Dcoat. But thow successful programs come at a price!!



For ease of use, sculpting in Sculptris is the fastest easiest way. Reliable and fun. I don't have to worry about subdivision, because it tesselates.
Workflow: Export a [subdivided] mesh into Sculptris, begin sculpting, subdividing if neccessary. Use textures as bump brushes and export the final OBJ as the high res version.

Truespace, with lot's of subdivision to very high levels is also intuitive and fun. With a leverl 4 or 5 subdivision level, I can achieve much detail. The high polycount does lag quite a bit. You also have to freeze your subdivision layers to sculpt at that detail. But unlike Sculptris, you can do a linear approach to detail from various SD layers, to the next layer, to the next and so forth.
Workflow: Subdivide the low res mesh, sculpt, freeze, subdivide again, sculpt, freeze, subdivide again, sculpt using texture stamping methods for textures, freeze, export. Import the low res with UV's and the high res to the normal map program and there you go!


Blender is not so intuitive, and I quickly gave up (no internet at the time to hit the tutorials...) But I assume the workflow is similar, having to subdivide when needed and sculpting with the required tools. I also think you can sculpt on different layers of SD detail also, revert back to where you need to go and get the job done. But with a high polycount, it too lags. This method, theoretically I think has the most potential for free.. but the steepest learning curve. And because I don't have the internet at the moment, and it wasn't that intuitive, I don't know the workflow nor how to use it properly.

So let's begin.

Tasks:
1. Create and sculpt an asteroid based off the concept sketch
2. Texture the asteroid with two major Shaders in TS



So that is the asteroid.




Started with a sphere with top and bottom caps.




With some sculpting tools, I pushed and pulled a little to get this result. I also pulled out select vertices to get the spikes




After studying a great illustration i found online, I liked the red, white and blue light setup with my new AO rig that I have offered as a prize in the competition at the moment. I got a brainstorm idea of an arealight with soft shadows and ambience.. thinking of a similar method of my AO rig, making an area light rig. I am not sure how many "rays" it needs.

I did some experiments in TS and it's area light on WS is... lacking rotation abilities, scale abilites and shadow abilities... So I can make an area light rig myself.




Now I need craters. So using the soft selection tool, I made a crater, then using a displacement tool, I added textures to get this fantastic result! Didn't take me 15 minutes! Then using a gradient constant shader, I took an orthographic image from the top, imported it to Paint.net and made a little random displacement texture with 3 craters, 1 large, 2 small.



Then with a sphericle projection, i place a repeated displacement map over the asteroid. I have to subdivide and freeze the mesh accordingly.



A better subdivided result. I do have some issues of overlapping meshes with the displacement mapping, but they aren't of any nuisance.




I got pretty excited, because the displacement mapping did a great job really quickly! After freezing the displacement map onto the mesh, I fixed the mesh up a bit, threw in my favorite realtime shader, a translucent orange, and did this nice quick screenshot.


Textures later, after I unwrap and clean the mesh a bit more, maybe make the spikey end more spikey and then do the UV unwrap in Blender then import into Sculptris or Blender to do some texture painting. I may stick to blender for that as I liked the looks of it, considering the possibility of texture layers. I just have to study up hard... cause Blender is by far not easy to learn for me (unlike some software I can pick up by just using it)

This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing your process.

Update: Made it more spikey on the downside.

Rendered in WS almost realtime.

Learning how to UV and texture paint and have texture layers in Blender. I like it once you learn it!

I did a smart UV unwrap in Blender, and then started painting it in Sculptris, then I added some texture in Blender again and then using GIMP, added more textures and figured things out.

Unfortunately due to some of the painting abilities of these programs, I found it hard to paint detail textures on without seams.....

Not sure where to put my Alkathosk updates now, I have a number of threads, so I think I will get back into this one.

So thanks to my good ebuddy Froo or Jason, he recorded some voices for the project for me, and using Audacity, I have edited and made a quick sequence of animation. (I started animating the project without a plan) so I can get maybe a short story underway. I'm still testing out TS's animation styles.

For dualcore, my computer isn't the fastest in processing HD video, but using VirtualDub and Avisynth and Blender, you can put motionblur, dof, process image sequences into videos, and using Free Studio you can compress it to any format you need. I also used the Largarith lossless codec.

The animation... You can't do any animation in Matrix values with the morph values enabled or animated, I've found. You must disable all morphs before animating Matrix values. Then it's best to animate the morphs afterwads.

I'm not sure what's going on there with the clip animation tracks, but they have to be in a certain order, certain way, for them to work well.

For sound, i have been using Clinton's script kindly provided to play a sound file when you press play.

I also have used a MS plugin called cacophony to see the wave file form. It doesn't do scrubbing, but it helps to know where and what I should play.

So audio is adequate, no audio scrubbing and the preview can only play from the beginning on WS.



But it will help get the job done.

I am still working on the characterization of Minlis, I think the next step is to make a library of his movements and stock animations.

Animating in TS is quick and easy with the pose tool, but it still requires some fiddling around with tracks and the posing, sometimes a mix of FK and IK helps. Also there sometimes are rig problems, and if the tracks are wrong, keyframes can corrupt things. But the idea is to figure out what works in the code or system, and work quickly with it. The rendering, the WYSIWYG aspect of it all is nice, plus the post effects of VirtualDub and Blender are quite nice.

Ah, and for batch image processing, i use FastStone Resizer, also free.

I will post more rig experiments up with sound later!

Hey glad to help Draise! Let me know if you need more voice samples! My wife can also help; she is a voiceover artist as well.

Decided to resurrect this project, building and doing things in Blender where TS will not, yet still work and enjoy the fun of the animation and WS viewport.... till I am profficient enough to use Blender.

I found a cool viewport functions with GSLS or something, so might try learn that......

Anyway, did a rock sculpture in Blender, following this tutorial: LINK

I also found a neat link for keyboard shortcuts HERE to help learn Blender

I rendered this in Cycles, so far.. so good! I have to learn some Bilateral Blur composite tricks to get rid of the noise without gaining much render time.... this time around I did the post in Fotor w8 app. As you can see I need to up the AA.

And I'll let you in on a secret.. this is my first ever Cycles render.

Nice Draise, and congratz on your first Cycles render, too!