3D stuff

I found a new favorite program to go along with zbrush and silo.
its called 3D-coat and creates advanced normal and bump maps on low poly meshes.
Its fantastic
http://3d-coat.com/

Also
check out the free MakeHuman project
http://www.makehuman.org/content/download.html
all generated meshes have identical polygon counts and poly orders so you can shape morph between them




I really like makehuman, version .9 has a different mesh worth checking too.

If you use silo
this Silo Head Pack is a great learning and experimenting base:

http://www.sharecg.com/v/19083/3d-model/Human-Head-Pack-for-Silo-2

These are not my heads, you can search for Silo Head Pack and find the guy easy. They are awesome to study.

I've been experimenting with using 3d coat to make paths and details on UT2K4 terrain static meshes



You can see the low poly mesh subdivided once from a lwo hypernurbs in silo

All the detail is from the normal mapping and bump!
Its the same mesh



 

see how the low poly mesh looks fantastic with the normal map details?
The blobby was made in 3d coat with the voxel sculpting
this was then imported into zbrush after being optimized from 240000 polys down to 70000 polys and the normal map was applied as displacement in zbrush. The red is to track contours for uv mapping which had to be flipped on the u or v on import into zbrush. So I have imported texture and depth into zbrush.







the 4 maps for a doom weapon model can be exported directly from 3d coat right into the mod folder
the mesh was extracted from the md5 using a lightwave export pugin and the normal and texture maps from the game load directly into 3d coat with mapping active
very nice

the voxel sculpting is cool for roots and muscles and pipes and stuff

doom 3 machine gun 3d coated.
Killing zombies is better with a pink machine gun.
As you can see below I haven't pinkified the world mesh yet, just the view model.



These are from Celestia, the best solar system universe sim with nasa connections
it is way cool..
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/

 










this is just a wierd thing I'm doing in max 9 with displacement on a plane
then I used c4d because I could get a denser plane mesh
the last is a zbrush displacement, which is hard to tweak
and here is a youtube version of a different painting with animation:
http://youtu.be/5TQ9Yyr-g7A





Yed is a tool you can use to create dialog maps