Human Male Athletic Final Model (Free Download!!!)

Concerting In ZBrush (Getting Started)

This learning series is geared toward new ZBrush users who have never used the program before and would like to learn quite a few of the sculpting tools along with various ways to create geometry.

Please visit my Youtube playlist to see all the videos in the series.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZFR-eziSwLa0nfTPviN6cO6GQCADkKDx

Human Athletic Male WIP ZBrush Screen Grab

Here is a Work In Progress for the new Human Male Athletic Version 2 model that I am currently working on.



I wanted to share a few things that I have found recently that have helped me sculpt inside of ZBRush lately.

The first is the ability to load a project directly into ZBrush. This will save your model, your materials and more importantly all of your new BPR rendering settings.

I have made a default project that will load all the setting and materials to give you the rendered look that you see above. Just load your model in and hit CTRL R to render the scene.



DOWNLOAD THE PROJECT HERE

The material that is used in this default project comes from the artist Luck_1 at ZBrush Central.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE ORIGINAL POST WITH THIS SHADER

The last little bit that I would like to share with you is a cool sculpting brush that I found on the art of Jose Alves da Silva (What a name eh? Cool! :)

Take a look at his website ( CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE SITE) , there is a goodies section, in there there is a ZBrush section. You can download the brush there. You have to try it out it can make some really cool strokes.

Here is an example of some of the cool sculpting strokes you can achieve with this brush (Zeyon Cutter Brush):

It is hard to explain until you try the brush out but it feels like you are cutting into the sculpt with a hot butter knife. Really fun stuff. This was made with just cutting in and pulling out the model with the brush. The just a little smooth in certain areas.

Peace-NickZ. :)

KillKat Male With Gear WIP

Here is something I have been working on for a little bit here and there. I would say more it has been more there than here. Anyway, I'm having fun modeling and sculpting. :)

3RD Eye Blind (FREE ZTool Download)

I finished a little mini project for myself and I thought I would share my work with everyone.

First I was snooping around on the Freedom Of Teach website and I saw there was a “CG Practice Model Download”. I thought it might have been the hi res model that they used to generate their 3D print, but it was just an base mesh with no detail. I’m not sure why but I just stared sculpting on it. ( really didn't need to start anything new at this point.)

At first I was going to do just another organic model but I was rather impressed and inspired by the hard surface modeling that FoOD and Sebcesoir have been generating inside of Zbrush lately. So I gave it a try and here are the results.







I used masks quite a bit. The clay tubes brush worked rather nicely for building up flat surfaces along with the flatten brush and of course the smooth brush to clean up some of my mistakes. I also used the lazy mouse with the standard brush and a custom alpha for generating strait lines.

I found that using some of these custom alphas that I made with the standard brush, with lazy mouse turned on and a lazy step of .01 gave me rather nice results for long smooth thin lines.





I also created a few custom Material Capture shaders for sculpting.



I built a Photoshop file that makes it kinda easy to generate new MatCap shaders. I things on layers to control the over all shading of the material, you can get custom control of a shader if you want to build a MatCapwith this file.



After the model was complete I used Zapplink and Photoshop to build a base color texture. I also wanted to learn more about lighting and baking that to a texture in Maya. So for the color and lit version of the texture I created several passes that separated out the lights, the shadows, Ambient Occlusion (created in XNormal) and then cavity mapping created with ZMapper.



If you would like to download a package with all of this material

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

This Zipp file contains:

Hi Res Zbrush Model
Color Texture (4096 X 4096)
Color and Lighting Texture (4096 X 4096)
5 Custom MatCap Materials
4 Custom Alphas
Layered Photoshop file with all the lighting and color passes (1024 X 1024)
Layered Photoshop file to help build your own custom MatCap Shader.
Maya 2008 Light Rig Scene


When you load the .ZTL file it will be filled with the color white and have the MatCap Grey material already applied to it. If you would like to apply a different material to the object turn on MRGB, choose the Flat Color shader and go Color>Fill Color. You can now pick any shader you wish to view the model with.




If you load the color texture I provided I suggest using the MatCap Pearl Cavity shader to look at the model.

If you use the color and lit texture that I provided then you will need to apply the Flat Color material with the texture applied to view the model correctly.

You will also need to flip the texture vertically.

I hope you enjoy! :)

Peace-NickZ. :)

I just wanted to post one last pic. I got my 3D print in the mail and I just wanted to say a big thanks to Gabriel from CRYSTALLINE MODELS for making this print possible!

Here is a shot to show off the scale of the final print.

NickZ Manimal Time Lapse

NickZ ZMaterial Pack 001 (Free)

Here is a material pack that I put together. These materials only work inside of Zbrush 3.01. Feel free to send me some feed back on these, I would love to see what people create with them.



CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE MATERIALS.

Peace-NickZ :).

XBOX 360 controllerServer (test)

I have been looking into using an XBOX360 controller as a real-time input divide inside of Maya. I had my Alien Shark character laying around collecting dust so I thought I would use it as a test to see if I could do some real-time motion capture like animation in Maya.

I'm pretty pleased with this first test. The feedback is slooooow when I have high quality rendering on with all the bells and whistles. I think if I was going to do this for real I would need a very simple representation of my character to animate with, capture the performance and then render with a higher quality model. (Or I would need a much faster computer.)

Here are the controls that I made for this creature.

Here is a real-time screen capture of my Maya viewport, edited this in Camtasia.



Here is the second test that I created. In this test I captured the motion using just simple shading, this way I could capture the motion in real-time. Once I had the performance captured I put the quality to hi quality rendering with textures,normal maps, lights with shadows. I then playblasted that into this little movie.



Peace-NickZ.

Alien Host Time-Lapse Movie

Here is a time-lapse move that I created of a 3D sketching session inside of ZBrush 3.0.
This was the first time that I creaed a model from a sphere. I then added some music and produced the final movie file in Adobe After Effects.

made with the new ZBrush

Enjoy! NickZ. :)

Alien Shark Time-Lapse

Here is a time - lapse movie that I made with Zbrush 3.0. Created with just a sphere.


NickZ's Veoh Art Channel

Alien Host Render

Here is a rendedr that I created in Maya. Rendered with Mental Ray in Maya 8.5.

This model was sculpted inside of ZBrush, resurfaced in Maya, painted in ZBrush 3.01

Peace,

NickZ.

Alien Shark Renders

Here are some renders that I created for a ZBrush and Maya project. I sculpted and painted this model inside of ZBrush and then Rendered in Maya.

Here is what the model looks like inside of ZBrush.

Here is what the model looks like rendered inside of Maya using displacement maps.

Here is a final render inside of Maya and comped inside of Photoshop.

Peace,

NickZ. :O

Broken Wall (ZBrush Environment Time-Lapse)