Zbrush Speed Sculpt: Space Cop

I actually took a little over an hour on this one. Theme this week was space cop, so I made a space coppish thing.

"Space license please..."

3dPrint: Goblin!

I finally got this guy printed from Shapeways. It's the largest model I have printed so far, standing at 12cm. I was able to get the price down using a bunch of tools in MeshLab, Zbrush and Maya to ensure it had a physically accurate minimum wall thickness of 0.725mm throughout the entire model, reducing the material density to a crazy 1.87%.

The details held up pretty well. The only areas that didn't were the toe nails, finger nails and the chain-mail overall, which was expected.

The print stands at 120mm tall, and is printed in the Fine Polyamide (Nylon) material.

The render of the model from ZBrush. 

Adobe Photoshop CC- Not exactly an early adopter...

Its a words post! Where is the code? That comes later... for now, words. I'm now an official owner (or at least subscriber) of/to Adobe CC... yeah, I got through my whining stage and now I'm learning to love the cloud, or, at least learning how to accept the inevitable.

Long live the cloud! I guess.

But from the Photoshop tool development perspective I think I actually find it a little more exciting than I am letting on. You mean *everyone* will be on a standard version? No kidding! What an awesome development! No more hacking in (sometimes) seeming random version numbers! The ability to assume everything you want to support is supported. Great! Don't have the right version? Update your Photoshop buddy!

When taken from that perspective I really think that Adobe's decision (aside from the whole aspect of never actually 'owning' the software) is a pretty great one. Maintaining pipelines for multiple versions of Photoshop ceases to be a major problem*, and tool development and distribution becomes, if not simpler, at least a little more direct in execution. 

I'm also taking my first steps into the Photoshop SDK, which is an incredibly powerful and daunting piece of architecture. Not only does it require C++ for creating plug-ins, but it also seems to be half way between a development framework and a history lesson on ye early days of Photoshop. And the documentation? Reading through it, there seems to be a big Photoshop SDK tutorial shaped hole where the SDK tutorials ought to be. 

But, if it were easy, it wouldn't be as fun! Now to work through that hello world tutorial...

* Currently supporting four different versions at work and trying very hard not to.  

Perforce: Setting up Ignore lists

Sometimes your local workspace will have files that you don't want to check in. Examples include Maya swatches files, if you are using Unity, the library folder, and anything called tmp.

You can set up P4 to ignore files and folders using the P4IGNORE environment variable, and a text file in your perforce root called .p4ignore.txt

Here is how you set it up:

An example of the contents of an ignore file. Comments are added using the # sign. 

• Create a file in the root directory of your workspace (eg: C:/Projects/Perforce/) called .p4ignore.txt
• Inside this file, define which file types to ignore. For example:
• The .swatches file, which is generated by Maya. 
• The Library folder, generated by Unity. 
• Any other folder that contains source file work that should remain local to people's workstations (texture bakes, render data etc).
• Once this file is set up, open the command console (windows key + r then type in cmd) and type in: p4 set P4IGNORE = .p4ignore.txt

Setting the environment variable in a windows environment. 

• Now, Perforce should ignore the file types and folders defined in the text document. 
• Next time an attempt to add this file is made, a warning should show up, and the files will not be added to your changelist. 

Thi

ZBrush- Goblin final sculpt and 3d print Prep

In between writing tools and prototyping a pretty sweet new project (shhh!) I've taken the goblin sculpt far enough that I'm willing to dump some dough on a 3d print. Here is the final, posed model, ready for hollowing out and sending off to the magical 3d printing machines.

The entire model, from start to finish, was created in Zbrush. It all started with a sphere, and the primary tools used were the Clay Buildup brush, clip, move and transpose toolset. I can't get enough of the clip brush. Seriously.

Posing anything in ZBrush is a bit of a pain in the ass, but the Topological masking feature of the transpose tools makes it a lot more intuitive (even if the transpose tools themselves are pretty ambiguous in function). But once you get how its meant to work its suddenly one of the most enjoyable 3d tools to use.

The basis for the clothing was created using the panel loops tool, and the belts and buckles were added using a curve brush (which is an absolute bastard to use). Finally the model was combined into a single shell by gradually combining and dynameshing the individual elements.

I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out as an actual model!

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Edit:

The model is now available on Shapeways!