![]() I was worried about how challenging it would be to teach primary kids between the age of 6-10 years old, since I’d need to simplify my lesson a lot from the thorough plan I had when I taught the seniors sculptris. Before we knew it the room was flooded with kids, I started to get ready to teach but the kids were already into the program and having fun exploring it. Dan helped me gather the laptops from next door and set them up in preparation for our big class as we were told we’d have up to eight to nine students. Since Dan didn’t know how to use the program, I arrived early to give him a quick lesson on the tools in Sculptris before the kids arrived. I agreed since I had never taught the primary kids before and I was happy to help out, I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was excited to teach the primary kids. For landscapes or hard-surface objects that don’t need to deform, use the PROP feature and you shouldn’t have any problem.Dan’s lesson plan couldn’t go through today due to software problems, so on the night before our visit, I was asked to teach the primary kids Sculptris. A:M has a reputation for not playing well with polygon-based programs, but I think you just have to understand the limits and work around them. I just wanted to try it and see what happened. I’m not sure if I will use this technique on some of the gear, or if I would just model from scratch in A:M. I dragged and dropped it into an Action and it perfectly aligned with the Hyena model! All I had to do was add a translate to and orient like constraint to the head controller and I was done: ![]() In A:M I imported the helmet and assigned a rusty steel DarkTree material to it. I then sculpted some detail–though not too much, because I wasn’t sure it would work…īefore exporting the helmet, I ran the Decimation command on it to reduce the polygon count, then exported an. obj and imported it into Zbrush, painted a mask for the helmet and extracted the geometry. I had an idea this evening to see whether I could combine Zbrush and Animation:Master by using the extract command in Zbrush to create equipment (in this case a helmet) and bring that geometry back into A:M as a PROP. The new render time was only 2 minutes per frame! I eliminated global illumination, ambient occlusion, and multipass–relighted the scene with Z-buffered shadows instead of ray-tracing. I started rendering the shot (in HD, 1280 x 720), The first couple of frames took over 1-1/2 hours! With over 400 frames in just this shot, that was way too long…I knew that I was going to have to make some compromises…. The dust particles are Sprites emitted with each step, and are drifting off to the right as though blown by the wind (actually there is a fan Force Emitter creating the wind). I set the ground plane to Front Projection Target and Flat Shaded. Then I added extra detail of the rocks and scrub as an overlay layer. I added the dunes in the distance, and the sky, as layers underneath the rendering. So I decided to render the landscape by itself to get the lighting, and retouch it in Photoshop to create matte paintings to use as background rotoscopes in A:M. ![]() ![]() Unfortunately, the maximum texture resolution in Sculptris was too pixelated when rendering up close. The detailed rocks in the pass is where the main action of the scene is, so I figured that I could just drop the landscape in as a PROP and render everything in A:M… The reason I wanted to use Sculptris is that I could use the Reduction brush to simplify the geometry in the distance. In this case, I used Zbrush to generate the geometry, but I exported it to Sculptris to work on the detail and textures. Using the greyscale values, it is pretty simple to generate a terrain mesh. The DEM files and software are available for free here. I started with a Digital Elevation Map (DEM) and exported a greyscale image from MicroDEM. After doing a number of tests each way, I felt that a hybrid matte painted look was going to be better for the introduction of this character… ![]() I have been a little torn between using somewhat realistic CG landscapes or digital paintings for this project. ![]()
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