Fix Symmetry is a LightWave 3D modeler script I wrote for my own personal use some time ago. I recently polished it a bit by giving it a decent GUI and some more options, so I could release it. I hope some of you might find the tool useful in your workflow.

It’s a more elegant symmetry correction solution than my SymmXMirror tool as it’s non-destructive, but they both have their time and place when appropriate to use.

Fix Symmetry offers three different functions to help taking care of symmetry problems in objects while modeling. Symmetry Check, Quick Fix and the interactive Tolerance Fix.

Check out my Fix Symmetry page for more details and to download the tool.

Have fun and enjoy! :)

Tags: 3D, CG, Development, LightWave, Modeling, Pipeline, Plugin

I have wanted to change a great deal of things on my website for quite some time, but it’s always a bigger project than one anticipates to make major changes, so it’s been on my list of things to do when I have some time to spare. This weekend I finally put aside that time to get my hands dirty with this update.

Other than making a new design, the structure of the website has changed. And for the few subscribers I do have, the URL to the feed has changed. I’ll have the old URL redirecting for some time, but to make sure you keep the subscription live, please update your RSS/feed reader to the new correct URL.

The RSS feed for artstorm.net is now located at: http://www.artstorm.net/feed/

Anyway, I was so bored with my old design, and it was way to much work to add new portfolio items and such so I didn’t really bother keeping it updated. Which was pretty evident as most images in the portfolio was from 2004 and not much has been added since.

Well, I’m thrilled to finally have got rid of the design in the screenshot below, I was so bored with it.

Artstorm V3 Design - Now put to eternal rest!

I’ve been using Wordpress for the blog part of my site for about a year, while the rest has been my own PHP/MySQL scripts that I’ve put together when time permitted. It was a pain keeping the code updated as well as going through all the necessary steps when I wanted to add new content to the site.

And as I’ve seen Wordpress progress the last year, I’ve felt for sometime that it had everything I needed to drive every part of the site with it. So I threw out all my own scripts, installed Wordpress for the entire site and spent the weekend making a new, fresh look to get rid of that old depressing brownish disaster.

Well, I’m very happy that I took the time to do this update, and I managed to fix almost everything during the weekend, I just have some minor things left to tweak (mostly texts) and then I can let it go and just focus on adding content. Woohoo!

Well back to work, new stuff to be added shortly!

Tags: Web Design

Alright, time to post another speed doodle, I’ll keep these babies coming until I’m completely satisfied with my speed vs quality before moving on to make complete character projects with the new techniques I am developing for myself.

This is approximately a 4 hour sculpt from the first drawn ZSphere in ZBrush until the final textured render in LightWave 3D, as seen below. Let’s call it a small Sunday evening project.

Click to enlarge

Of course, it’s far from perfect, but with the small amount of time spent, I’m pretty happy with it. I could tweak it for a few more hours to make it shine a bit, but that would defeat the purpose of my speed modeling/sculpting/texturing/rendering sessions.

I started this time as well by placing a few ZSpheres and then converted them to an adaptive skin, ie. a polygon mesh. I tweaked the low poly mesh to get the proportions somewhat how I wanted them, and then just kept going by subdividing, detailing, subdividing, detailing and so on, until I had reached about 2 million polygons. I didn’t use any references but just kept going and let the character evolve by itself as I went along and the details started to come through.
A few screenshots from the different stages of my sculpting can be seen in the image below.

The progress in ZBrush, from ZSpheres to detailed sculpt

I spent around 2 hour in total with the sculpting part of the character. At this stage, I would have retopologized the mesh if it was a real project, so I could animate it properly, but as this wasn’t the case I exported the low poly version to LightWave together with a displacement map.

Below is an ambient occlusion render of just the mesh with the displacement map in LightWave.

Male Head - Speed Sculpting - Ambient Occlusion Render

Well, well, then I spent around 2 more hours, painting/creating the color map, specular map and the bump map in ZBrush and Photoshop, as well as setting up the shaders and lighting in LightWave for rendering, which ended up as the image at the top of this post.

I’m getting closer to move on to bigger things, but I’ll probably make an additional doodle or two in the coming week.

Working Music: Joan as Police Woman - To Survive

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

About a year ago, I wrote a post about customizing modeler, since then I’ve completely switched to a 64-bit environment and with LightWave 9.5 just released, it was about time for an updated version.

LightWave 3D was once known as the fastest polygon and subdivision modeler on the market. The modeling workflow was considered one of LightWave’s strongest features and this held true up until v7.x (2001). Then the years passed and because of different reasons the modeler became neglected, in the v8.x (2004) update the modeler was pretty much ignored and when 9.x (2006) was released the modeler still didn’t receive any significant changes. So what we have here is a former state of the art modeler that hasn’t received much love in 7 years except for a few minor updates, acquired 3rd party tools and some halfbaked additions. This has lead to that the competition has caught up and even surpassed LightWave in this time.

Do we have to wait until LW10, which supposedly will get the long awaited modeling updates? Or can the current release be tweaked to still be a top modeler for a speedy workflow? According to me the latter holds true.

My LightWave modeling experience goes back to LW v3.5, so I know it pretty much inside and out, and my recent experience with other modeling packages comes to using Modo quite regularly and also to some extent I model in 3ds max when I do on location work. Even though Modo is the most elegant modeler I’ve ever worked with, it do still lack a few operations (which I guess might be added when 401 comes) and 3ds max has also grown a lot as a modeler in the last couple of years, and is very competent by now.

Still though, when it comes down to it, I do model with an incredible speed in LightWave compared to the other apps I am comfortable modeling in.

The “secret” to unlock the current LightWave’s modeler to a compentent speed modeling package consist of four important steps to learn and change in LightWave:

• Learn the keyboard shortcuts.
• Get some brilliant plugins.
• Customize your modeling menus.
• Use your extra mouse buttons.

Learn The Shortcuts

I can’t stress this enough! If you keep spending time switching between tabs and menus in modeler each time you change the active tool, you’ll never get a speedy modeling flow. Spend all the time needed to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Force yourself to use them as much as possible until they become second nature. Print a shortcut reference card if needed. The time spent learning these will save you so much time in the end it’s worth every second. I always keep one hand on my mouse and the other hand on the keyboard while modeling, to jump between the common tools I use in a split second. The less time spent digging through menus for tools, the more time spent pushing vertices around.

The must have LightWave 3D plugins

Fortunately the LightWave community is blessed with having many brilliant 3rd party developers, which have created additions that fills up about any gap lacking in the out-of-the-box modeler, bringing the modeling experience up to par with other packages. Some plugins are commercial but many are free.

Since the release of LightWave 9.5, where FFX and FBX are available native in LightWave and most plugin developers have by now compiled 64-bits versions, I made the decision to completely switch  to 64-bit LightWave. Still, as not all plugins I relied on in the 32-bit era are available as 64-bit compiles, I had to sacrifice some or find replacements.
Here is my current must have modeler plugin list, all available in 64-bit versions:

Modeling:

EasyMesh, DEdgeSlide, EasySplit, Swift Edge Loop, SpMove 3, Fix Symmetry, SymmXMirror, Polygon Coloring

Texturing:

PLG UV tools, Select UV Island

Rigging:

Skelegon Editor, Normalize Bone Weights, Show Weights

Missed babies:

Pictrix brilliant modeling plugins (PX_Clone, C_Worm etc…) is still 32-bit only. Pictrix just released SP_Move as 64-bit, and have promised that the others will follow soon though. RopeEditor, TrueHair and Pawel Olas plugins (TreeDesigner, Leaves Generator…) would be cool to have as well, but they are no show stoppers.

Also if you do any kind of hard surface modeling, LWCad is the best investment you can ever make (64-bit version available).

Customizing Menus

The default menu configuration, even when using the Studio Production Style layout, doesn’t do it for me. As it’s not feasible to have every tool mapped to a key (and remember it) and the mouse just have so many buttons, one still have to rely on selecting tools in the menus now and then. To avoid having to look for tools and break my modeling flow, I have designed five new tabs that are more logical to me.

Custom Tabs in Modeler

Depending on what I do in modeler, I have a tab for each task. If I model, I have my modeling tab selected, where I have all the tools that I use which is not mapped to a key, available right next to my modeling area so I never need to switch tab while modeling. And the same for all other tasks, tabs for texturing, rigging, hair and the fifth for the 3rd party tools which I only use occasionally.

The Modeling Menu

This is my customized tab I use when modeling. Combined with my mouse configuration and assigned shortcuts, I almost never ever leave this menu during a modeling session. I primarily model organic shapes, so the tools I switch between is pretty much aimed in that direction, but there is a few for hard surface modeling as well, which is more or less what I need in that area most of the time.

Modeling Tab

Add & Reduce

• EasyMesh - An excellent tool, that works like XSI’s tweak tool or Modo’s element move. Drags points, edges or polygons depending on what you click on when dragging, no need to switch mode. And with the RMB it extends geometry. A really fast tool to tweak geometry and quickly build up new shapes.
• Multishift - Bevel on steroids. Bevels in several steps and polygons can be grouped. And best of all, advanced bevels can be stored, either to disk or to memory. I use store to memory for instance when I have made a nice nail bevel on a character to quickly reuse it on the other 4 fingers.
• BandSaw Pro - Cuts a loop of polygon in as many rows as needed.
• Rounder - Create rounded edges or use it on a single vertex and it works as a chamfer tool.
• Dissolve - Removes an vertices, edges or polygons from the mesh.
• Collapse Polys - For those occasions where I quickly just wanna rearrange the flow of a group of quads.
• Bridge - Connect polygons with new geometry created in between.
• BandGlue - Glues together two rows of looping polygons to one band.

Edges

• Edge Slide - Slides Edges on the mesh while preserving the shape.
• Easy Split - An excellent tool to cut in new topology directly on the mesh, almost like drawing.
• Swift Edge Loop - Slides edge loops with the LMB and adds new edge loops with the RMB. A great boost for the edgeloop workflow.
• Add Edges - Adds new edges between polygons. It doesn’t support symmetry so since I got EasySplit I have more or less stopped using this one.
• Edge Bevel - Bevels an edge interactively.
• Divide - Splits an edge in two segments.
• Spin Edge - Spins an edge to adjust the flow of the topology.
• Sharpness - Drop down menu which contains Set Sharpness, Decrease Sharpness and Increase Sharpness. To be used on edges when working with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces.

Curves

• Spline Draw - Draw a new spline.
• Add Points - To add more points to existing splines.
• Patch - Create solid geometry from splines by patching them together.

Detail

• Untangle - Adjusts the selected polygon’s vertices into a circular shape.
• Flatten - Quickly flattens the selected geometry on the axis of choice.
• Drill - Perfect for making details by stenciling shapes in the background layer onto the geometry.

Modify

• SpMove 3 - The ultimate move tool. There is no move operation this one can’t perform, including all kinds of snapping.
• Translate - Great when used with RMB, as it then translates the geometry along their normal axis.
• Translate Plus - Moves geometry in a controlled fashion. Lot’s of options, but I mostly use the segment translation, where you can select an edge and have your geometry move in that exact direction. Very handy when extending polygons on a mesh that’s not laying perfect on the XYZ axis.
• Pnt Normal Move - This is the closest you come to an interactive smooth scale. It moves vertices or polugons along the normal axis. I use this quite a bit now. With some cleanup afterward I get the results I am looking for pretty fast.
• Magnet - Move with a fall off, great for organic tweaking. Like pushing cheaks or moving an ear and things like that.
• DragNet - Pretty similar to Magnet but the drag tool with fall off instead of the move tool.
• Weights - Set weights for Subpatch Subdivision surfaces.
• Create Pole - Collapses n-gons into tris.
• Fix Poles - Fix a poled part of the object into quads with a small sections of tris in the middle, which helps to create clean subpatches.
• Absolute Size - Let’s you numerically enter a defined size for your object when scaling.

Tools

• Fix Symmetry - Select a point of each side of the X axis and this tool makes them symmetrical.
• SymmXMirror - Corrects the entire mesh for symmetry errors if such should occur. It does it the hard way by cutting, mirroring and merging the mesh.
• Toggle Backdrop - Toggles the backdrop images on/off, when reference images is used in the background.
• Polygon Coloring - Prepares a new version of the mesh to be rendered with a subdivision wireframe for a pretty presentation of the object.
• Subdivision - The subdivision tools in a drop down menu; G-Toggle Subpatch, Set CC, Set Face, Set Subpatch.

Organize

• Create Part - Creates a new part of the selected polygons.
• Sketch Color - Changes the sketch color of the selected polygons.

Selection

- All these tools are selection related and needs no explantion me thinks?

• Sel Points
• Sel Polys
• Sel Edges
• Loop Expand
• Loop Contract

Click for fullsize

Texturing, Rigging and Hair Menus

As this post is dedicated towards a fast modeling workflow in modeler, I won’t go into any great details about my other customized menu tabs other than a brief overview.

Just like my modeling tab, these live their own lives and tools gets added or removed as I update my workflow or adapt new techniques or tools. So they are never final.

The hair tab has a few empty sections as can be seen in the screenshot, TrueHair and Hair Blade is missing. They are leftovers since I was running a 32-bit install and these plugins are not yet available for 64-bit. I’ve kept them around though, as I hope 64-bit versions of them will arrive in the future.

Other than that, the menus are pretty self explanatory, check them out, dissect them and see if you like the mix of tools and how I’ve grouped them. As I have been mainly into modeling and rendering with LightWave the last year, these menus have not got as much attention as they should have probably.

If you are interested in using my menus, or use them as a starting point to create your own, feel free to download the attached zip file where I’ve exported the four menu branches. To use them go to Modeler’s “Configure Menus” window, where you can right click on the “Main Menu” entry and select “Import Branch” to add my menus as new menu tabs.

Download my customized LightWave9.5 modeling menus

Setup your mouse

I have come to understand that many people doesn’t use the power of their mouse when working with LightWave 3D. A customizable multibutton mouse is definitely the way to go, by assigning a couple of convenient keyboard shortcuts to the extra buttons.

Personally I use the Logitech MX Revolution at the moment, a mouse I’m very happy with and which has so many extra buttons thanks to the thumb wheel, that I haven’t decided what to map to the last buttons yet. If anyone have any suggestions for what would be nice to add to the scrollwheel’s tilt function, feel free to send it my way.

Modeler Mouse Setup

I have a huge difference in my modeling speed compared to when I model without my mouse shortcuts, it shaves of a great deal of time each day, and as the days go by those saved minutes adds up.

Conclusion

Take the advice that works for you, adjust and tweak the rest to your liking, and I am sure you’ll find that LightWave’s modeler still contains tons of power for a fast modeling workflow.

Happy speed modeling!

Tags: 3D, CG, LightWave, Modeling, Plugin, Tutorial, Workflow

LightWave 3D 9.5 was just released. An excellent update to the current LightWave cycle, which I am extremely pleased with. And with the promised hotfix/service release (9.5.1 maybe?), that should arrive shortly, fixing the minor things that didn’t make it to the Siggraph release (which I hope includes fixes for the FBX bone export and OBJ parts export/import) it will be an awesome production horse pumping out projects here.

But with every new release, the eager part of me can’t help thinking of what I want the next version of LightWave to be like. So here’s my top ten countdown of what love I hope LightWave 10 will receive.

• 10. Updated UV tools. The UV tools definitely needs a more modern touch. Currently they are usable because of excellent 3rd party tools like PLG UV unwrap. In LightWave 10 I hope we get a native UV Unwrapper, just as good as PLG or preferably better. Other goodies would be that all modeler tools should work in the UV editor, UV overlap checking and a decent UV to image exporter. The current EPS exporter doesn’t work very well with subpatch UV’s and so on.
• 9. Unification. The separate application system (Modeler/Layout) has played out it’s role. Now it’s time to bring all modeler tools inside Layout and just call it LightWave instead. Modo is an excellent example of how one unified environment still can separate different tasks in an elegant way. Also many modeler tools can be unified into one tool (No need for 5 different bevel tools as an example).
• 8. Instancing. Instancing is long overdue in LightWave and can only be solved with 3rd party tools at the moment. HD instance is a good rendering instance plugin. But this is something that should work out of the box in a modern application. And when it gets implemented I really hope it won’t be just rendering instancing but also modeling instances. Modeling instancing is where I personally would need it the most.
• 7. More Nodes. The node editor for surfacing that came with LW9 is wonderful. I just love a node based workflow, as it’s such a powerful and intuitive way to work. XSI ICE is a great example of the power of nodes. I do hope the node system in LW9 will be extended in LW10 to work everywhere. Nodes for particles, dynamics, motions, renderbuffers and so on… More nodes to the people!
• 6. Topology tools. As sculpting packages gets used more and more, some topology tools would be really useful to have to be able to retopologize directly in LightWave. A good constraining system where you can constrain to a background object and build new geometry on top of it would be oh so useful. All tools should respect the constraint and it would be so easy to quickly make lowres meshes of hires sculpts and such.
• 5. Hair tools. With FiberFX making it’s first appearance in LightWave 9.5, I think it’s an excellent first iteration. I am very happy with this new addition to LightWave. For LightWave 10 I hope the progress continues, especially the styling tools, as I think the hair renderer is very good already (not that I don’t hope that it will be even better the next time). But the styling tools would be excellent if the FiberModeler could be ditched and instead having the fibers available in the ordinary modeler view, and having the styling tools as ordinary modeling tools so they can be used and combined with other tools. And with a background constrainer (See 6. Topology tools), the fiber strands could easily be prevented from penetrating the underlying geometry.
• 4. New Dynamics Engine. The dynamics engine in LightWave hasn’t seen much progress for some time and starts to show it’s age. I especially hope the cloth dynamics will get some much needed improvements. A mode tailored for hair simulations would be excellent, but just get the ordinary cloth solver up to date - Closer to realtime calculations and with better precision I’d be very happy.
• 3. Improved Rigging. Character animation in LightWave works pretty well today I think, I don’t really share the opinion that LW is no good for char animation. And with the new pole vector and IK features in LW9.5 things got a bit better again. But the rigging! That’s more or less a pain in the a.. at the moment! It just takes way to much time and it’s incredible incovenient jumping back and forth between modeler and layout during the process. A unified environment will probably solve some of the pain automatically. But what I really want is to be able to edit my weight maps while having my bones deform to immediately see the effect. It’s just to much guesswork and editing in the dark at the moment. And a setup mode would be excellent, like it works in pmG:messiah. I want to be able to jump back to my setup pose and edit any bone or make adjustments without the rig breaking or the animation going bonkers.
• 2. Render Pass Manager. This is something that can be solved with 3rd party tools today, but they are all workarounds and implemented as good as the current architecture can allow. In a modern rendering application this is something that should be native in my world. Preferably a node based workflow where buffers and savers can be combined to my liking. I want to have a list of passes and buffers and set it up with different combinations of shaders/lights/objects and just press render and get all the images outputed at once and jump to my compositing package. Currently it’s pretty much a pain to work with render passes in LightWave, and it’s such an important part of a modern workflow so this is definitely something that I really think must make it into LightWave 10.
• 1. Micropolygons/Buckets. The recent updates to LightWave’s renderer have made it top notch for fast, high quality GI renderings. And with 64-bit computing and tons of gigs of RAM I can easily squeeze millions and millions of polygons without LightWave even thinking of breaking out in sweat. But as it’s pretty common using displacement maps and highly subdivided meshes today it’s quite an uneffective use of resources keeping it all in memory instead of rendering the scene in buckets. And even with a mesh subdivided to millions and millions of polygons I can’t seem to get the same level of details in LightWave coming through that I for instance can get in Modo when using micropolygon displacements. So this is something I really, really hope will be implemented for LightWave 10.

One can dream, right? :)  To me, if these things made it into LW10, LightWave would be an amazing state of the art 3D application again. The 9.x cycle has been ongoing since 2006 with 9.5 probably being the end of the line for 9.x, so I believe the first signs of LightWave 10 development will surface during late Q4 2008. I hope so anyway. So it will be exciting to see where we are heading then. I really hope as much as possible of the list above is under consideration for LW10 and will make it to the release. Oh, would that make me drool rivers and take a flight to NewTek HQ to crawl in joy before the dev team.

Still if just number 1 and 2 (Renderpass/Bucket render with Micropolygon displacement) makes it I will be thrilled with excitement.

Tags: 3D, CG, LightWave

Siggraph is over for this year, and as always there’s been plenty of announcements and releases within our industry this week. Vue 7 and ZBrush 3.5 was announced and I’m looking forward to further information about these releases, especially the new ZBrush release, which I suspect will be awesome, once again! The new Mudbox version looked interesting, but didn’t convince me enough to try it out instead of ZBrush. Also Luxology showed an interesting tech preview of the next Modo version, and the new BodyPaint version from Maxon looks interesting as well. And not to forget XSI 7, which is awesome, but comes with a hefty price tag, but I’ll keep my eyes on it in the future and might add it to my pipeline if I can justify the cost down the road. Lot’s of goodies in a short time.

But for me, the major event at Siggraph 2008 was the release of NewTek’s LightWave 3D version 9.5. A massive update to the core package of my pipeline!

LightWave 9.5 has been in beta since February this year, so I have had around six months of time to play with this baby until now. The 9.5 beta cycle has been the most interesting yet, the developers have been very responsive to input and suggestions for each beta release and the progress has been amazing through the months to the cool release it finally became.

This is without a doubt the best .x release of LightWave ever (and could just as easily been labeled a x.0 instead) with all the new major additions and fixes.
I won’t go through every new addition to 9.5 as the complete list is available in NewTek’s pressrelease. But my personal favorite additions that has kept me drooling through these months are:

• FiberFX, the brand new integrated Hair and Fur system. Based on Jon’s FFIV plugin, but since they brought Jon on board, it has evolved to a completely new beast, integrated into LightWave. For a first release I think it’s amazing, and with Jon on board developing this continously I believe it will have a bright future.
• Amazing GI improvements, with the once again updated radiosity engine, LightWave now calculates GI with an incredible rendering speed and image quality leaving most other render engines far behind. And one bonus word; Flicker free GI animation. LightWave is definitely again the state of the art rendering application, top of the line.
• Light API, the new light class, with lot’s of new native and 3rd party light types.
• Native FBX Import/Export/Merge. Finally, I can get rid of the AutoDesk FBX plugin for LightWave which was for 32 bit only. As a MotionBuilder user I rely heavily on FBX and are very happy to see this go native in LightWave.
• And so much more, the list can go on and on and on…

And did I mention that 9.5 is the coolest release of LightWave 3D to this date? And it’s a FREE update once again. Very cool of NewTek, an amazing release and value. LightWave might not be back at the top of the line where it once where, but they are definitely heading in the right direction with this release, and if they keep this progress going, I’m very excited to see what LightWave 10 might bring to the table, but in the meantime, congratulations to NewTek and the entire development team for the excellent 9.5 release!

I am a happy camper!

Tags: 3D, CG, LightWave, Software

Most of July as well as the first week of August have been colored with an absence from work and I’ve been living the pleasant vacation life.

People have been visiting me as well as me unlocking the chains from my workstation and got out traveling to a few different places to go to concerts, having cold drinks as the beach, enjoying hotels, attending art exhibitions and taking quite some photos (I got myself a new 24-70mm, f/2.8 lens for my DSLR) and ended it all with tons of great music at the Way Out West festival here in Gothenburg last week, held for it’s second year.

A few great, relaxing weeks to get some new energy and inspiration. Things got back to normal this week and I have had to catch up on some work, and have delivered four new projects already. I have started using a calendar now, hehe, so I have scheduled some catchup time for the website here as well.

The Cookie Monster attending a Barbecue at my place

Tags: Life

I took a few hours tonight and had another speed doodling session. I worked from my imagination with this one, with a goal set to as fast as possible get a decent looking character. I really need to get a speedy workflow in modeling characters for some of my upcoming projects, so I’ll probably make a few more similar doodles around this theme.

Click to Enlarge - Quick LightWave Setup and Render

The image above was created from scratch from the first polygon to final render in about 3-4 hours. This was mainly a ZBrush project, but I did end up rendering it out in LightWave 3D at the end. If I had spend some time on bulding a skin node network in LightWave and worked a bit on the hair it would probably have ended up pretty decent looking, but I’m saving that for the next time.

Anyway, I started this project by making a few ZSpheres and sculpted and pushed around the mesh from there, going up in level of detail now and then, trying to capture the basics of the female facial form as much as possible. Check out the image below for a few screenshots from different times in my sculpting process.

ZBrush Sculpting Workflow

At this stage I felt I had got most of the structure down as I wanted it. As sculpting from a few ZSpheres in ZBrush doesn’t create a decent topology, I included fixing the topology to my workflow this time.
To fix that, I roughly painted out directly on my character how I wanted the topology to flow, somewhat close to what I like, and then I used that model with my paintover as a template, building my new topology on top of that. When I had my new topology in place, I projected my sculpted details back into the new mesh. Here is three additional screenshots; The original topology - My paintover - The final topology.

Click to Enlarge - Retopology Process in ZBrush

Alright, the third one looks much better, so to end this session I made some basic texture painting as well. I didn’t bother with painting any Subsurface Scattering, Specular, Diffuse maps and so on this time, I just wanted to get some texture down and painted a simple color map. Here is the color map rendered in ZBrush with a basic skin shader applied.

Finished Texture Painting in ZBrush

And to close out this doodling session, just for fun, I exported the model out of ZBrush and brought her into LightWave. I made a quick and dirty wig with some hair strands, just a few minutes worth of work, and then rendered out the image at the top of this post.

Well, that’s it for this time. I shall return.

Working Music: Markus Krunegård - Markusevangeliet

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, Texturing, ZBrush

A 3 hour speed sculpting.
I haven’t used ZBrush for a while, so I doodled around in it for a few hours today, to get the groove back. The image below is the result of a couple of zspheres and then just playing around, sculpting out the basics for the female form. I wasn’t going for accuracy or realism this time, just trying to get the shapes down and having some fun with it.

Click to Enlarge - ZBrush Speed Doodling Session

I could probably go on for a few more hours, keeping on refining and improving on her looks, but that would take the speed out of speed doodling. When I ended my sculpting session I exported her out of ZBrush together with a displacement map, and made a quick and dirty render in LightWave 3D, which is the render above, trying to capture at least some mood.

Actually, I think it’s pretty healthy to do a doodle now and then, to give myself some time to explore some new tools and techniques in my applications which I might not dare trying out when I do real projects. I’ll probably try do this somewhat regular to work on my speed and nail down better techniques.

Sculpting Music: Reyn Ouwehand - The Blithe, The Blend and The Bizarre

Tags: 3D, Art, CG, Character, Female, LightWave, Render, Sculpting, ZBrush

I’ve recently put up an unofficial plugin section on artstorm. I don’t really code anymore, and I don’t have any intentions to return or dig deeper into the world of coding either these days, as I am just to much in love with my 3D work. But I do from time to time write a few scripts when I need a tool that’s currently not available and it’s within my reach to quickly develop it. So when I finish a script I’ll put it online there, so they are available if anyone else might find use for them besides me.

This section won’t be linked from the main menu of my site, but feel free to bookmark it or link to it from any other site, as the section will be there permanently.

I recently published the SymmXMirror tool that’s available there, and also the SaveIncBak modeler script the other day, which was born from a thread on the NewTek OB forum where Miguel Méndez Menéndez posted the idea for the tool. Also many thanks to Miguel for tracking down the differences between the Windows and Mac file system through LScript to get it working on the Mac platform as well.

I do have a few other modeler tools that are more or less working as they should which I’ll upload quite soon. I also have some scripts I’ve developed while working with my film projects for basic render pass management. As I’ve made them for me, the GUI is lacking big time, so I have to spend some time cleaning that up before I can release them in a state useful for others. So it might be while before I can spare the time for that.

Well, over and out for tonight.

Tags: 3D, CG, Development, LightWave, Modeling, Pipeline, Plugin