http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7wxIJcdAag

am currently working on an adaption of the Witchblade Armor form the anime of the same name, im modelling it for fallout.

anyway i have a serious problem so far, the high heel "boots" kinda wont work, the new method to use scale bones has so far not been tested in fallout but only oblivion and im actually not in the mood to do that lol... me lazy ass yaya...
however if i keep em that way theyll sink into the ground, i could shorten the calves but then she would look like a midget, mmh any ideas welcome

adapt the heels.

i prolly sound liek a moron now, but, what do you mean by that? :unsure2:

I think he means shorten them up a bit. Will they really clip through the ground so much anyway? skip the skeletal variation idea. I don't think that is in any way applicable here.

looks promising. but the matcap svcks, I can't see much, but I'm sure it'll kick boo-tay. Are you gonna mask off the armor areas, leaving the skin, extract to mesh, retopo, then bake out some maps, or something else?

http://fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/854960-1273462745.jpg



well the whole sole vanishes, shortening the calves is imo out of the picture since the vanilla calves are kinda short in comparision to the anime reference anyway, im trying to replicate the oblivion method atm including those scale bones, dont know if its feasible yet

i did a retopo since decimation master didnt give me the results i needed, due to the retopo i didnt have to mask, extrude or whatever and the final mesh became super clean, hands are annoying to model btw
however the zbrush retopo tool is quite the joke if you ask me lol... ill prolly use max or topogun in the future or wait for zbrush 4

i baked some maps yet but the texture is much to dull (see pic), it fits the anime however that is an anime and we play fallout so it needs more detail, am trying a hexagon weave atm as main structure for the red parts, as for the greyish metal things im not sure yet, using the usual metal texturing doesnt fit the cleanliness of a selfheling piece of organic latex metal from hell imo

btw i used you environment map article on the nexus gog the 6x1 ratio did the trick, looks sweet ingame with all those reflections, id advise however to use, instead of photoreferences, ingame screenshots. this allows the reflections to fit in better imo.

also, if you use max or somin to quadify the vanilla bodies you can get very nice base meshes for your sculpting pleasure, sure youll prolly need to retopo in the end but its imo a much more intuitive way to sculpt than to model crazy shapes

HOLY :blink:

looks pretty good. yeah- texture need more pop. I think I like your ideas for adding detail. I imagine the spec map can go a long way to satisfy what I think is missing. the protrusions on the shoulder look pretty deformed, or am i tripping, if not is the rigging still being worked on? and do I spot a couple of smoothing errors on the leg, or is that just me and that particular piccy?

totally. need to be quaded before going into zb. it just twists up and pinchs other wise. polyboost seems to do a fairly good base job of quadrifying. but I usually have to go in and add in some poles and some extra loops... anyway I haven't scultped anything is so very long.
yeah a lot of people have a hate for the retopo workflow on zb. tbh the only thing I dislike about it is its a bit convoluted to get into retopo mode. and out of. Other wise I love the ability to polypaint your topology first. and really work out a proper edge flow before hand. then its pretty quick and stable imo.

yup the skinning must and will be redone for sure, the shoulders are basicly the only bugger at all tho lol, was quite smooth to skin it actually

the spec map should depend on the structure of the object but so far it has none, im still not sure if the hexa weave will look descent either, after wathcing the anime now im more for somin like vines or thick venes or somin growing round her, will have to watch it a bit more i guess to get the feel right, im quite happy so far tho, its not that much off from the original even tho i just started watching the show 2 days ago long after the basic model was done , one should prolly watch such references before one starts tho i think

there shouldnt be any smoothing errors actually, except maybe on the extruded edge, didnt check those in particular, the other hard edges are supoposed to be that way

even quads are not enough for zbrush to project details accurately, you would need perfect quadrats or at least rectangles (but more of those) for it to not distort the texture which is a heavy bummer, use a tri or a traqez in a prominent spot and all goes to hell, svcks if you just finsihed a (in your mind) wonderful model, export the textures and they look like "EEEEEK WTF happened here?"
also tris dont work with all functions of zbrush, some simply wont work if there are any even tho zbrush creates tris itself with many of its tools, using only quads however creates poles and more polies hence its often a battle to decide wether you want to use a quad or a tri

will have to try polyboost one of these days,
i kinda like zbrush retopo but its for one totally wrong how you get to that function (rigging??? what has that to do with it???), for another does it change the size and position of the mesh due to the rigging and its a hazzle to fit it back on whatever it needs to align to and last but not least does it have basicly only one function,
and this one function has many flaws -.-:
-you need to click ctrl every 2nd line
-you cant make connecting lines if you cross an intersection, the next line will start from the prio vertice again (do they want us to build massive poles instead of a topologie???)
-the vertices vanish every 2nd click and i have to rotate the model to get them back
-moving a vertice makes it loose the hold onto the surface
these together make the workflow really slow, i took about 1h per elemnt of this armor (body suit, arms, legs, blades), only the pauldrons went by quickly
max, blender and co also have snap to surface settings with which you could simply do the same with all the super functionality of those programs, decimation master plugin for zbrush makes sure you can use kinda medium poly models that show all the detail you want to transfer, topogun can even import high poly models tho its also advised to use decimation master beforehand, sadly DM creates tris or it would be totally amazing to create low polies from sculpted meshes and we could spend the time we retopo atm with somin creative and productive (4h retopo like in my case would have been enough to sculpt for example a t-shirt jeans combo)

you can avoid/correct for that, and don't need to fit it back to anything. otherwise yeah. I just get a better topology outa zb for the most part, used max to retop my last pair of gloves, but tbh I think it took quite a bit longer to do than i to.

it think no spec is making it look flat in that screenie. i think with some heavy AO in the spec and a little attention on highlighting all the appropriate edges will give it the depth its missing.

I like a subtle veiny organic idea better than the hex mesh.

ohhh?
how do you correct or even avoid the zspohere rigging transformation problem? thatd be damn cool to know, tell me, tell me!!!