Damn it ZBrush work with me here!

We had a quick introduction to Zbrush from a 3rd year before Easter so I've been trying to put those notes to use and create some stepping stones to try and get to grips with sculpting and Polypainting. So starting from a simple base mesh over in 3D Studio and then over in ZBrush painting in some texture and a diffuse map I got this.

Nothing incredible I know but it was a start and I was only making a stepping stone which is what I got out of it.

So since I was obviously on my way to being a ZBrush master I thought I'd try something else and picked up the rocks from the asset list that were meant to be Dominic's models but the level scripting were given more priority. So I tried a couple of new things for these, first off I went straight into ZBrush without a low poly based mesh something I felt from the start would spin around and bite me but we'll get to that. With no based mesh I instead started using ZSpehres to get my basic shape and went in after with the planar brush to define the forms.

Pretty sure I over worked it. It would work for a more stylised world I think but I'm working from a Fable based style guide and their forms are a lot smoother and not quite so busy.

Regardless I keep working with it, it's rare I use my first model for anything but practice and testing anyway. I added wear and damage to the edges and surface and neatened it up using a morph target which is a stored copy of the model in an undamaged state so if I think I've taken too much off somewhere I can use a morph brush to put more of the original form back into it to lessen the damage. Finally I added noise to the surface and I had a pretty decent first attempt at a rock.

Then I hit the low poly problem. I decimated the mesh and brought the tri count down but the topology was a mess. I know in organic shapes we can be forgiven for triangles but this thing had never seen a quad in it's life. I tried to retopologise in ZBrush but the tri count would skyrocket then brought it into Max to see if I could do anything by hand. In the end it wasn't working, Pro Optimiser did it's best and I tried to clean up after it but in the end the base shape was changing too much and there wasn't a hope that this would match the Hi poly model enough to bake out the normal map cleanly so I'm thinking that it's best to put this one down as a fail and when I go back to try again, this time I'll be producing my low poly first. 

In the level there's been a pretty simple yet effective change. From this:

To this:

The switch to evening lighting was probably one of the best decisions we've made in the project. The light shines through the trees better, the colours work better with the environment and colours of the flowers pop more.

I also got some decorations finished this week.

And used the ribbon, sash...thing to decorate the fences in the garden.

The main things left now are mostly scripting to finish and a few small things such as sounds. We're getting there.