Lessons from the Crypt: Ghiath Saleem

Ghiath shows us some very useful techniques for working inside of ZBrush in his Scared Silly thread at ZBrushCentral.

Creating Geometry From Alphas

Using Make 3D in the Alpha palette, Ghiath was able to convert an alpha of a mirror into a 3D mirror!

To create the mirror, Ghiath used the two alphas to the right. The alpha on the left was used as the wood framing of the mirror and the alpha on the right was used for the mirror itself. They were then combined together as SubTools.

By pressing Make 3D in the alpha palette, each alpha is converted into a 3D model. Note, that Ghiath also set MRes to 256 and MDep to 5.

MRes is the resolution of the resulting mesh. The lower this is, the low the polygon count will be as well as the amount of detail you can retain from the alpha.

MDep stands for the the depth of the resulting mesh in Z. As you can see by setting this to 5, it results in a thin mesh.

Sculpting A Halloween Pumpkin

To sculpt the pumpkin, Ghiath shows us 2 possible approaches:

• The first approach uses masks and Mesh Extraction to create a hollow pumpkin head.
• The second approach uses masks to isolate the features and then sculpting to get the look you want.

Texturing the pumpkin comes from sampling photographs and using the inflate brush.

To see more of Ghiath’s Scared Silly entry click here