14 replies to this topic

[kbrilliant]

Just what everybody's been looking for---another digital alien. But I had fun freeform picking away at this. All voxel level sculpture work. I may take it further into texturing--perhaps try the per-pixel painting.
Questions or comments welcome.

Ken

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[johnnycore]

Lovely work you got there, I love the amount of detail!

[Sandro Borg]

Excellent work Ken.
You can never have enough digital aliens - keep them coming.
How many polygons did you use to get such a fine level of detail?
Looking forward to seeing how you texture it.

[digman]

What the world needs now is Aliens, sweet Aliens....
Now if you remember the song you are as old as me...

Nice work and it would be interesting to see him textured.

[kbrilliant]

Thanks for the comments. The model is at almost 8 million triangles and is still fairly comfortable to work with. I wonder how auto-retopo will work with this.

[digman]

One way to is before using auto retopo with edges loops is to hide the areas that will have the hardest time for the retopo routine to figure out and get right like ears, thin edges etc...
You could to do a test an auto retopo with edge loops and see what areas are having problems, then hide them with the voxel hide tool.
Delete the first auto-retopo polygons.
Rerun the auto retopo with now the problems areas hidden. You might to need readjust some of your edge loops and strokes too.
Next delete the unneeded polygons and unhide the hidden voxel surfaces.
Manually retopo and then connect the new polygons to the existing polygons.
This way you avoid at least some of the tedium of doing it all manually and have few less auto retopo headaches...

More stuff.
You can set the depth of the hide tool in the E-Panel. I did not but it was just to show you a method...
Also you can use the hide brush to hide voxels in a more softer manner and then smooth out those areas but remember to undo the smoothing steps before unhidng your hidden voxels.

On your model the thin areas of voxels and the mouth area could have problems with the auto- retopo routine but you would have to run it to know for sure.

Of course always have a back-up file if you forget to do something right...
Picture is using the hide brush and a fast example of using the hide tool using the splines from the e-panel.

Edit: Some of this stuff, I know that you have a good chance of knowing already but it can be helpful to others as well...

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[Monkeybrain]

hey, how many ram did you have? It looks great. how many polys did it have?

Perpixel? Its only my opinion, but I think that I will favourite - for my self ptex - like it....

[michalis]

Hey I missed this.

Wonderful sculpting!

[kbrilliant]

The model is at almost 8 million triangles and I have 8 gigs of RAM. I suppose I could go to the live clay tools to add more detail where desired, but I don't like the fact that you can loose your live clay work if you switch back to voxels. So, I haven't explored those tools too much.
digman---I like your technique for hiding troublesome or complex parts of the object for auto-retopology. I never thought of that--thanks!
Michalis--thank you!
I'll post more when I progress
Ken

[kbrilliant]

Here is a little update:
Pictured is the mesh created with auto-retopo after some minor cleanup and the rendered model with displacement map in Softimage.
I'll move onto the other texture maps in 3D coat and see how that aspect of the program has been shaping up.
Thanks for looking

Ken

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[randomguy_j]

One way to is before using auto retopo with edges loops is to hide the areas that will have the hardest time for the retopo routine to figure out and get right like ears, thin edges etc...
You could to do a test an auto retopo with edge loops and see what areas are having problems, then hide them with the voxel hide tool.
Delete the first auto-retopo polygons.
Rerun the auto retopo with now the problems areas hidden. You might to need readjust some of your edge loops and strokes too.
Next delete the unneeded polygons and unhide the hidden voxel surfaces.
Manually retopo and then connect the new polygons to the existing polygons.
This way you avoid at least some of the tedium of doing it all manually and have few less auto retopo headaches...

More stuff.
You can set the depth of the hide tool in the E-Panel. I did not but it was just to show you a method...
Also you can use the hide brush to hide voxels in a more softer manner and then smooth out those areas but remember to undo the smoothing steps before unhidng your hidden voxels.

On your model the thin areas of voxels and the mouth area could have problems with the auto- retopo routine but you would have to run it to know for sure.

Of course always have a back-up file if you forget to do something right...
Picture is using the hide brush and a fast example of using the hide tool using the splines from the e-panel.

Edit: Some of this stuff, I know that you have a good chance of knowing already but it can be helpful to others as well...

Hey Digman.

For your example head here Did you paint the wrinkles on? Or did you use LC/ voxels? Reason I ask is my system is pretty beefy but for some reason when applying fine details in LC (especially with alphas) it seems to have a hard time tessellating or getting the details from the alpha to look good.

[kbrilliant]

Attached is a bit more progress. Initial color and spec work done and rendered in 3D Coat.
So far, the performance in the program is decent.
I'll post more if I see complete more on this creature.
Thanks for looking.

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[b33nine]

Paint looks great so far Kbrilliant. Really dig the hue shifts for the eyes/nose/brows/lips.

[Garagarape]

Nice lettuce-sea man! Looks real.

[Markus F.]

Crazy looking Creature.
Like the painting it fits to him very well.

regards
Markus