Christmas Break

Over Christmas I took a week off and I went home, but before and after then I got quite a bit of work in and learnt a few new things.

I decided to move onto my wall next and so I had to go and learn the ways of ZBrush. I have only ever used Mudbox before and I haven't done much in that apart from sculpt my face for a university module in 2nd year.

I found my first attempts at sculpting rocks were god damn awful but I manged to improve quite quickly.  I spent a lot of time experimenting in ZBrush and seeing what I can use within the program.  So the first few days were me learning the ropes and playing around.

I decided to adopt a approach covered in a tutorial by a Naughty Dog employee to make my walls.  The pipleine (very simply) is to sculpt some bricks, texture them and make a tilable texture with them in 2.5D.

I sculpted 6 different bricks and textured them using ZBrush Spotlight.  I tired to make the silhouette of each brick different so add variation.  Since I had 6 bricks, that meant I had 36 different sides to play with when I have to make a tiling texture.

I then brought these into 2.5D within ZBrush. There was a lot I was still learning about ZBrush and 2.5D when I was using it, and I unfortunately made several major errors and had to restart the wall a total a 5 times.  I made a document for myself and any others that were interested to remind myself how to avoid the errors.

The annoying thing was the errors are simple and very easily made, but if you get it wrong then there is no undoing it.  One thing I really dislike about 2.5D is that once you have placed a mesh and deselected it, there is no way you can select it again.  I have found no way of moving yet but it is something that took a lot of getting used to and a lot of forward planning.

The errors that I made included;
-Depth of the bricks on the canvas
-The wrong document size
-The texture that I mad was not tilable as I had not used the tilde key to move it about
-ZBrush automatically drops to the bottom layer after reopening so I painted on the wrong layer
-I made the gaps between the bricks too large

The biggest issue was when I had finished the whole wall and then realised it didn't tile.

I had to go back in and start all over again and produced a better wall.

I then encountered a problem where ZBrush messed up my layer, it looked like some sort of anti-aliasing issue. 

I couldn't fix it so I had to drop back to a previous save and rebuild the missing pieces.  Once I finally had the wall finished I tried to send it over to PS via ZAppLink. It kept coming up with an error message so I spent a long time updating ZBrush, linking files, checking files, trying to see if there was another way to link to PS.  I was completely stumped until my friend Jussi (http://jussibrox.carbonmade.com/) swooped in and pointed out that I needed to set it up, it took all of one minute to fix!