Hello Dragon!
Late night is the best time for lurking and posting both. I love those quiet hours when the rest of the world slows down; wonderful for getting work done. Thank you so much for the compliments, they mean a lot! I am very nervous about posting things here most of the time, so it always feels great to know when someone likes something I’ve made. (Though I love a good constructive critique too!)
Second Life is a really bizarre game, but it can certainly be awesome, if not always even a “Game”. The really amazing thing about it though is that everything in it is user generated, user created. It has open building, scripting, animating, everything… so you can really make and do just about anything you want. And it takes no time at all to put it all in motion… so, as soon as I finish a piece I just upload it and… ‘poof’… dozens if not hundreds of people are then running around playing with it in real time. It’s an amazingly fun feeling.
As for the gold: most of that I didn’t actually use a mask for. I find I run into the same issues a lot with jagged masking edges, especially when it comes to convergent materials. So most of the gold elements are actually RGB/Add/Sub painted directly on by hand with the standard brush. No alphas or stencils were used aside from a wonderful “Screw” alpha available in the downloads area. I find that painting while sculpting at the same time, and always /last/, helps make sure that the materials are well defined inside of the lines they are made for. Doesn’t work for all workflows, but it helps.
Also, I am not completely certain what you are doing in your project (though it looks really neat! Reminds me of something you would see in a Double-Fine game.) but would this help? http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161537 The first video explains how to blend materials while rendering in BPR. I don’t know if it’s what you need, but it might be able to help some! Hope it does. Shaders are still a bit over my head at the moment, it’s all very alien to me, but I hope to learn them soon.
As for rendering, none of those are actually pro-rendered at all! Both of the images (with the exception of the bodysuit picture) are actually in-game and in-world. The one with the Anubis in the hallway is actually just me wearing it in the game and snapping a screenshot with depth of field on. Same thing with the gauntlet. The glow was added inside the game using the game’s simple, built in tools and that is simply a screenshot I took when I was done. No Photoshopping at all outside of the black border I habitually put on my pictures.
And yes, working on a project from an old sketch from high school was a thrill. I have been inspired to go drag out my old sketch pad to see what other “ancient” characters I can dredge up from my youth. It was a blast.
Tonight’s project though, is a set of adventure themed items I plan on handing out as a gift to everyone in-world as a thank-you to the players for their support. This is an early backpack I made, though I’ve yet to fill it’s pockets and straps with tools and trinkets. Just baked it, need to go in and fix some of the texture issues in Photoshop. Much fun!
Rykka~
