Ryan Kingslien, a product manager at Pixologic, now has a nice learning blog out there called Sculpt. Paint. Create. There’s a decent amount of tips and tricks for ZBrush on it as well as other links to ZBrush related things on the web. I’ve been looking at it for a few days and have picked up some really good tricks to bring into my work. Here’s the link for you to check out:
http://www.pixologic.com/blogs/ryan/
Enjoy!
Sulz.
Here’s a trick I found when I was prototyping out waves for the our current project (It was actually used in Sid Meier’s Railroads with very nice results, although it was mostly due to great programmer implementation and very little to do with the art). This image is created with the eyecandy 4000 plugin set, more specifically, the smoke plugin.
I begin with a black background and create a simple curve shape on another layer. Don’t spend a lot of time on this, it’s only purpose is to create a selection set.
Next, use the layer to make a selection, then create a new empty layer to work on. Select the Eyecandy 4000 / Smoke plugin.
There are a lot of different setting you can play around with, but here I just show a sample wave setting that I started with. It’s important to note that I changed the direction of the “smoke” so it would point downward and added a side taper to fade out the edges. The original image is a 512 X 512.
Although I haven’t tried it myself, I’m fairly confident that you could use the Column Length setting to achieve some cool animated wave textures. Watch what happens as you move the slider. It could be a cheap way to collapse a wave if you have the texture space for it.
Here are the results from the filter (They vary slightly from the above image due to an accidental closing of a window). As you can see, the top is just the outside of the initial selection mask.
Now I just need to create some nice foam along the top. I created a new layer and changed it to additive.
I didn’t spend a great deal of time on the foam, but this give you an idea of what it’s capable of. It is very difficult to create a wave texture by hand, so this is at least a good place to start.
Eye Candy 4000 has a lot of other interesting features and is well worth the money. Here’s a link to their site:
http://www.alienskin.com/ec4k/ec4000_features.html
Happy photoshoping!
