Rykka's Reliquary - From Zbrush to Second Life

[Rykka]

Disclaimer!

I am a veritable walking tower of noob when it comes to Zbrush, despite my love for it. It is my first and only model program so far and my learning curve was/is very irregular due to learning by figuring things out as I went, and learning how to make things in really strange ways to adhere to really strange parameters for an equally strange game. So if you can bear with my immense amount of ignorance for the program, I will be most grateful. Chances are if you go off on a tangent I will not understand what you are talking about. One of these days I need to sit down and learn from square one, but I learned on a need-to-know basis as fast as I could for monetary reasons. -That said- I really wanted to put up some of my work for critique and suggestions. I read through the forums a lot and have managed to get over my relative terror at posting again by witnessing first hand what an awesome community is here. This is all for the online game called "Second Life", where I own a business making game assets for people to use in their play inside of the game. Be it roleplaying, action type stuff, whatever. I specialize in making avatars and clothing/armor/weapons etc. All the fun stuff that goes into character design. I tinker with architecture, but SL is not very friendly when it comes to that and Zbrush. At least not for someone with so little understanding as me. I got a few messages from the last time I posted. (Really, really crude, early examples.) And I've learned a lot since then. Whats more, I think I am finally knowledgeable enough to help anyone else interested in using Zbrush for SL to get started. Likely you will know more than me in an hour! So, here go some examples. ------------------ The Dusk Sorceress, concept to creation. ------------------ First I started off with some rough sketches, just to get an idea of the direction I wanted to take it. Things in SL have to be built in layers, and in peices. You have very strict mesh limitations and everything has to essentially start with a simple shape (sphere, cube, etc) at 32X33, and warped into a new shape from that point on. So each of the little armor segments would need to be their own unique model. At the time of making this, I didn't understand subtools and had to make each peice individually... just sorta eyeballing it, adjusting as needed later. [] But if anyone is interested about the process, or wants to see more- let me know! I have one or two other projects I wouldn't be /completely/ embarrassed to put up here. Just mostly embarrassed. I can also be reached in-world inside of Second Life under the name Lucia Cyr. I am always happy to talk to people and show them things when I can, though I can be pretty busy working a lot of the time so be patient with me! Hope this was vaguely interesting. Thanks!

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[kevphil]

Thanks for sharing your process. The assets seem very well designed, but I confess I know nothing about Second Life. Also, as a fellow Houstonian, I just had to shout out a “howdy”.

[Rykka]

Howdy to you too, fellow Space Cowboy/girl! And thank you. It’s a lot of fun to design for with very nearly infinite freedom in what you can do. The only issues being that you have to learn how to do some things completely backwards. But once you get the hang of it, it’s fun to be able to make assets and see them moving around in game with other people seconds later. Instant feedback!

[Rykka]

Another project I worked on, making spider people, similar to the Driders of D&D fame.

[attach=247672]DriderWIP3.jpg[/attach]

I had a lot of fun detailing on this one, and really pushed what I knew at the time.

[attach=247673]DriderWIP1.jpg[/attach]

Thinking I might even break out the leatherworking tools and try to make some of the parts, like this posture collar, in real life. Could be fun!

[attach=247674]DriderWIP2.jpg[/attach]

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[unonymouz]

This is so cool. The whole armor design and it’s heavy, bulky look reminded me of Oblivion. All the best with this software!

[Interu2x]

I used Decimation Master on my Woman Armor model too and some Details get low too but Still looking good

[MealeaYing]

This is fascinating!
I would love to know about how you are doing this, can you do a step by step of some sort?
I am very new to Zbrush but have been in SL for years and I am moving to Opensim and Aurora (lots of reasons for this).
In Opensim and Aurora sculppties have physics and are far better in that respect than SL, meaning you can walk on them and use them as terrain and so forth, being able to make things like body parts, buildings and the ground it self in Zbrush would be astonishing!

Thanks!
Mealea

[MealeaYing]

Oh!
I totally forgot, Great work!!!
/me grins!

Cheers,
Mealea

[Rykka]

@ unonymouz: I can’t say Oblivion came to mind when designing it, but I am a fan of that game (And it’s precursor, Morrowind!) so I will take that as a deep compliment, thank you!

@ Interu2x: I’m afraid I have no clue what Decimation master is. All I pretty much use are the basic brushes in the tool set. Due to SL’s rather rigid restrictions, a ton of Zbrush apps and nifty systems will actually corrupt the models for what I use them for. As such, I mostly just use Standard, Move, Smooth, Flatten… and… Pinch. Horrible, I know. It’s like using a computer from the year 3000 like an etch-a-sketch.

I am trying to learn to expand my knowledge base, Zbrush 4 has a /ton/ of new brushes, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t really deviated from my old workflow much to learn much about them. But I plan to, and look forward to it!

@MealeaYing: I could do a step by step for this, but really there are already some really great tutorials out there. In particular Shiny Life has a great set of video tutorials that I really wish had been out when I was blundering through this. It took me a month to get my first sculpt into SL! But now, the process is much more streamlined!

http://www.shiny-life.com/2008/02/12/video-creating-sculpted-prims-with-zbrush-3/
(For three)

http://www.shiny-life.com/2010/08/16/zbrush-4-and-sculpty-maker-video/
(For four)

Make sure you get the Zsculpty plug-in. It is a huge boon for converting and making sure nothing corrupts during the process.

@MealeaYing X2: Thanks!

[MealeaYing]

This looks excellent! thank you very much!
Now I have an excuse to learn about what UV’s are and what they are for…
I learned about how to do sculpties quite early on, I was initially appalled at the build tools and figured that sculpties were the way to go, I was using Blender then, but as I got used to the build tools I liked them more and more, now I would love to be able to export from Opensim or SL into ,Obj for texture work and detail stuff, funny how that works huh?

Thanks again!
Mealea

[Rykka]

Thank you kindly. I tried blender as well, but… I just wasn’t able to wrap my head around it enough. ZBrush is almost visceral in it’s process. It feels more like reaching out with your hand to mold clay than dragging vertices around. I love it.

And you can actually export from SL to obj, if you have full permissions on the sculpt maps. But, that is a heavy debate topic with some people due to content theft by people misusing it. But it is possible. I’ve done it a few times to help people who can model, but not texture, texture their stuff. I forget how now, I have a converter program for it somewhere. I’m certain googling it will pull it up!

[Rykka]

Orcs!

I worked on a project recently to make a series of male and female orcs. I wanted to show the two I was the most pleased with. The male Shaman and the female Warmaiden.

[]

Anyways, was a harrowing project. Two and a half weeks to make four completely unique avatars, modeled, textured, animated in-game. That might be plenty of time for many of you experts out there, but that was a new lesson in deadlines for me!

Either way, was greatly enjoyable.

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