Making Snake Scales / Dragon Scales

[salki]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to figure out how to do a flowing scale pattern on posed geometry. There was a challenge over at CGTALK a while back where someone recreated Frank Frazetta’s “Green Death” and had a snake wrapping around a warrior. The scales on the snake were amazing.

The scales appear to be more of an alpha mask, and not done via. primatives and using sel 2 row.

Anytime I try and use mask from alpha on say, an adaptive skin, it’s greyed out and I can’t do it. It’s only available on say a 3d poly sphere etc.

Any suggestions?

[jawa64]

should take a look at the snake brush. could modify the alpha for your needs.

[salki]

Yeah I’ve experimented with that brush, but I am not getting the seamlessness I need. Is there anyway to “fill” an object with a scale stroke etc?

[jawa64]

and the answer is… the alpha pallet can’t work with completely without UV’s.(new one on me.)
~ps there are also some 10 other scale brushes in the lightbox.

Yes! =)

Make sure you have the alpha you want to apply showing in the alpha window over on the left hand side. Then, under the tools palette, click Masking to open the masking controls, then click the button that says Mask By Alpha.

If the button is grayed out and therefor nonfunctional, then that means you need to apply image coordinates to your model.

To apply image coordinates or UVs, either use the UV master plugin or use the functions under UV Map found in the tools palette.

[system]

It took me forever to figure out how achieve scales, But I finally got it!

Here are two techniques I came up with:

Match Maker Brush

Cylinders of Cylinders

-Koichi
http://nakaikoi.squarespace.com/wip/2010/10/26/fish-scales-in-zbrush.html

Attachments

[salki]

Thanks for the response, but your images didn’t show up or weren’t linked correctly.

My major issue now is finding out how to do seamless patterns - say on clothing or armor. An example of this is the “Top Row” Catwoman or the same artist’s “captain america”. The scale-like pattern on the cloth is seamless - but this isn’t simply done by painstakingly matching up alphas - right?

My thoughts are they used a giant high-res alpha with many many of these pattern “cells” to get this.

If anyone has any guidance on this, it would be greatly appreciated.

[system]

yeah the images were not linked right, I think I fixed them.

I doubt that catwoman was made by painstakingly matching up alphas. Im guessing she was broken up into various polygroups, then laying out UVs using UV Master. Then applying a tiled cloth pattern on that specific area.

check this out for UV master:
UV master

notice how the checker map seamlessly goes across the entire model. Its the same concept, only painting clothes and isolating certain areas where you want to paint with polygroups.

There are many ways to make a tileable texture. One is in photoshop using the filter->other->offset feature and removing seams.

You can do it in zbrush also:
tileable texture

Hope this helped…

[moonlitmaverick]

@nakaikoi interesting suggestion, that match maker brush. I am facing a similar problem with feathers and i just posted a question regarding it. I thought of match maker but also thought of the huge memory overhead it would be what with all those feathers being matched. Didn’t those fish scales slow down your system? How did you create that flattened gills cyclinders ztool? duplicate, transpose ?

[system]

Actually, The Matchmaker Brush technique was kind of nightmare to use. Its great for putting on things like an fancy armored chest plate. But it cant go Around objects. So applying feathers around the bird would be tough.

Instead I came up with a different approach that worked nicely:

The Cylinder of Cylinders was created by duplicating a bunch of low res cylinders in 3ds max. Then bending the plane of cylinders 360 degrees with a “bend Modifier” to form the toilet paper roll tube. Load that into zbrush and sculpt it using the Elastic Move Brush into the shape you want.

I think this technique would work for feathers too, just replace the cylinders with feathers.

My next step is to see if I can turn this into a displacement map. Ill keep you posted.

Edit:
I just thought of something… to keep the poly count low, you can use mapped image planes instead of of cylinders… Ill do some tests tonight to see what happens

[moonlitmaverick]

@nakaikoi, cool! using move on pre-modeled gills is a great idea. That’s the kind of thinking one needs to employ while working with zbrush and modeling in general. By mapped image planes I guess you mean applying a gill texture to a plane with an alpha to reveal just the gill. I wish we could distribute planes on a mesh in zbrush and assign a texture with an alpha to them.