Alchemy + zBrush

"Lousy_Day" on the City of Heroes boards pointed me in the direction of a new drawing program of sorts called "Alchemy". It's a interesting little program and it's free. Calling it a "drawing program" may have been a little inaccurate...it's more of a creativity program.

At it's base it's a gestural drawing program with some very different tools and effects. Their site http://al.chemy.org/ posts a definition of the word alchemy as: "a process by which paradoxical results are achieved or incompatible elements combined with no obvious rational explanation."

While that's quite a mouthful, the more I toy around with the software the more I find that to be a pretty accurate description.

Based on a video posted on their site where a user combines Alchemy and zBrush, I thought I'd try the same experiment. So a took a few moments in Alchemy to draw this rather simple and very abstract black and white drawing. (you can tell by looking at it I had literally nothing in mind other than to create some interesting shapes)

Then I imported the image into zBrush as an alpha, inverted the colors, converted the alpha to a texture, and wrapped it around a basic head shape that I had pulled out of a primative sphere. Then by masking by intensity, I inflated, pushed and pulled on the masked head. Still, other than the head shape, I wasn't "going for" anything in particular. It could have been a helmet, an alien, a monster...or anything else centered around the head area.

In only a few minutes I began recognizing shapes and elements forming from all the pushing and pulling, and I just went with it. Subdivide up to the next level and keep going. By now I've deleted the mask to open up more options for sculpting.

And half and hour later I ended up with the model below.

Granted it's still pretty rough, but it's the beginnings of a futuristic, lion/humanoid creature. I must admit, it was a pretty darn fun process. I highly recommend it if you ever hit a creative block, or have a little free time to spare. I can honestly say, "You never know what you're going to create."

Check out the site, sign up for the alpha program and try out the software. Special thanks to "Lousy_Day" for introducing me to the software.

ChocolateBunnyGuy - mini-fig

All the wierdness has been ironed out and ChocolateBunnyGuy is ready to go. This is Stever's hero from City of Heroes and he's a very unique character indeed. The polygon strangeness was my mistake. With the seam problem, I was lucky enough to find a solution on the zBrush Central site. It seemed a little duct tapey, but it worked just fine.

Maya Weirdness

I'm currently in the process of getting my zBrush model into Maya for rendering. It should be a good test since this model has multiple subtools and materials. Everything was going surprisingly well with a couple of (relatively minor) exceptions.

1. There are still some seems popping up in the displacement map.

2. There's an odd rendering weirdness going on with polygon objects that aren't using a displacement map, namely the belt and the chains. I expect that problem was either caused by the export to Maya or it's a problem entirely in Maya itself, which hopefully won't be too hard to track down and fix.

Other than those, he's coming along pretty well.