Formative - Rock Sculpting in ZBrush

High Poly

First time sculpting rocks in ZBrush. I followed a few references and tutorials, and experimented with different brushes.

Result in the picture is a few hours of playing around with brushes and alpha and about 2 hours of actual sculpting.

I started out with Zspheres, built up the base and used Move brush to form the shape. I then used the Planar brush in combination with a messy alpha to draw out the hard edges forming the chunks of rock. Bit of smoothing, Dam Standard, and regular Planar to clean up, as well as playing around with the rock brushes I got from class.

I worry I might have bit off more than I can chew for the texturing, as I plan to do a hand painted stylised texture.

LOD and Texture (First Submission)

These are the LOD and textures I had for the submission of this formative, which took me by surprise as I didn't read deadline on the formative brief properly. I was planning on having my hand painted diffuse done by this afternoon, but the formative was due first thing in the morning.

This LOD is at 600 Polys.

Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Occlusion

The SketchFab model currently has some issues with normals/occlusions that causes some black patches.

Stylized Rock by Cynthia (Qingxia) Wang on Sketchfab

GA2A01 - Weapon Summative

It's been a while since I've last made a new post, mostly due to laziness and procrastination, an evil habit I know...

This was our first modelling Summative for the year. We had 4 weeks to model and texture a weapon of our choice, only requirement for the weapon being it had to shoot in some way. I was ill for the first two weeks, once cold and once flu, managed to get a week extension to make up some lost time.

I chose to make a crossbow, because crossbows are cool.
Nothing more to be added.

References:

I decided to go with something Steampunk, but I would've also liked to make a Cyberpunk or Magical crossbow.

Concepts:

High Poly

I decided to jump straight into Zbrush without building a base mesh in Maya/Max to learn more on using the program, and as a way to push myself.

I started out with Shadowbox, using the concept image as my reference and loaded onto each orthographic view of the Shadowbox so I can "trace" the basic shape.

I used clip curve tool to clean up the edges, panel loop to create all the metal bits on each piece, alphas for the screws, and a custom curved brush for the tubes connecting the canisters to the crossbow.

Texturing

Getting my normals and ambient occlusion took a lot longer than I expected. I had 18 separate parts, and for each I made an envelope and baked it in xNormal. I should have asked for help more at this stage to see if there was a more efficient way of baking the weapon.

I decided to go with dDo for my diffuse and specular as I was running out of time. They turned out alright, but I would have preferred to have hand painted textures.

Unfortunately I only noticed at this stage there were a couple UVs that were completely messed up, so there are stretched textures on a few parts of the crossbow.

Final Renders

Issues:

• Edge lines showing. Had to do with the baking process I believe.
• Bowstring not double-faced.
• Stretched textures due to messed up UVs.