hi all! wanted to try and render a sculpt that i did in zbrush a while ago in blender, the intention was to render it in maya, but i wasnt to happy about the shader and overall render, so now i want to give blender a try!
comments and critiques are very welcome!
displacement on mesh with multiple uv patches seamed to be a little tricky, but i think i found a temporary solution, i made a displace modifier for each 6 uv patches, then assigned a vertex group containing the vertecies with all the uv on its patch, then assigned the correct displacement file for that particular uv space, 32 bit exr vector displacement were used, as 32 bit displacement matches the sculpt almost perfectly opposite to 8 bit/16 bit files wich clamps minus values and above 1, first i got weird and flat displacement until i found the clamp checkboks in the image colors tab.
for direction of displacement rgb to xyz, thats it!
the only backside with this method is weird geometry along the uv seams, since the vertecies gets double transformation,
i havent found a sollution to this yet but will soon hopefully, but still the result is pretty good within blender! usually you get sharp slices in the geometry in other softwares.
Looking like a great start so far, how many polygons for all those scales?
Also, for your displacement problem, have you ever tried having the weight values at 0.5 along the seam border instead of 1, perhaps that can help blend them in a little by lowering the total net contribution from the modifiers.
nice dragon, can’t wait to see more
I’m a big fan of fantasy stuff, and I really hope you will achieve a perfect render of this dragon, since it seems that everybody prefers ogre and stuff like that ( I have nothing against ogres / orcs, but c’mon, you wanna do a dragon! How great! )
And as I am not able to do this kind of stuff yet, I won’t give you any advices, except maybe to make a whole scene instead of a sculpt render ? It would be awesome (It starts really good)
Anyway, I will be looking at how it is going, can’t wait for more
thanks for replies! Ace dragon, the sculpted raw mesh where about 9 mill polygons, it subdivides 3 times around 6 mill,
its great to hear feadback from all sides anyways
ive now set up a quick lightning and environment, three area lights, and a hdr image, mostly to get reflections in the eyes,
next will be adding the texture and shading
i havent tried that, cant see how yet i should be able to turn down the weight on the seams only, im open for ideas!
texture added
applied the textures using the checkerboeard technique for multitiles,
shading comes next
The texturing looks great so far, I think you nailed it if you were going for a somewhat airbrushed quality (though the shading is not applied yet so we’ll see how well they work then).
I’ll give you this, it’s been a while since this forum’s last seen a full-body Dragon model get this far.
i focus more one the shading though, the texture itself isnt to impressive, lets hope i get a decent render at last then
This is really good! The only thing I can suggest is that his eyes are a bit dark. I want to see his fiery soul!
A dragon is really all up to the creator. There are many different types of dragons and they all look great. It’s like a tree, there’s not really one single great tree that is/can be an example of “perfection”. In general nature gives the creator great room for freedom.
As for criticism, I would say the eyes could look more bright and alive, the teeth could have a dirty texture and could be bigger and more jagged, and the neck in general could be a big thicker and longer…
If this was a final pose, I would definitely go with the last pic of post #13, your last post since mine. The other one’s backgrounds look confusing. At least I know the background is the wing part in the last picture …
Very nice work overall though, it takes skill and experience to craft even the most simplistic of nature and make it look realistic
thanks! ok the eye! i actually lowered them, but shall bring back a little bit the intensity these images is only testrenders, im still trying to chose what environment ill go for, and will render out a nice complete one when i do
The shading seems to be really working in bringing out the rich details in the original sculpt (like the meticulous work that seemed to have been put into the teeth).
I don’t know if the teeth should look ‘dirty’ as there’s no real prerequisite for this type of creature, right now, he is looking like he’ll devour anybody who comes within his reach.
This looks amazing. Some SSS would fit in great I think for the skin between the head spines and maybe a little on the wings as well
well as it gets better so does the rendertime! good thing that he looks real! i should have done some animating! but current rendertime now is 1 hour, on the cpu, if gpu it would have gone 4-6 times faster, but i have 4 gig of video ram, and it used 5 gig when rendering, perhaps go down on texture size a little bit perhapse!? 8k x 6 tiles is alot!
thanx Words! i am working on it, but currently it washes out the overall contrast on parts where i dont want sss, i could increase the contrast in the sss shader maybe?