It's No Use! Take This!

Hey guys! 

FIEA is moving forward rapidly and it seems that I'm not keeping up quite to the speed that I would like. For shame! It's seems that I will not be blasting through some of these assignments with Sonic Speed. 

Lame pun is lame. I know.

But do not fret, dears, for I have at least one awesome assignment that I completed before the deadline this week. That would be the tile texturing for our weekly Common Core class! *throws confetti* 

Now this assignment was fun. Got to play around in ZBrush and figure out exactly what kind of tile I wanted to make. Now, the only draw back I had was that ZBrush kept on doing this strange thing of disconnecting to the modeling I was carving into and making it into a canvas. I'm not sure what causes this, however I'm eager to find out what does. Perhaps if I can do that, I can prevent it from happening ever again. I would hate to constantly redo the same assignment 3-4 times so it can work (which is what happened with this assignment). 

"Why me..."

However! With some patience I was able to make something awesome for all to see. 

First off though, let's looks at the renders taken right out of ZBrush!

The Main Render. This is the overall design for a soon to be colored tile. Looks pretty cool as it stands now. It's not painted. I like to sculpt on the red material instead of the grey. Not sure why. I think the color just pops more for me. 

The Depth Map. Shows, well, the depth of the scene. As good as that is, I think it may have ended up drowned out from the final piece. 

The Normal Map. Looks neat like this as well. Honestly, I'm surprised that it looks so neat and clean. 

Now for the coup de gras!

The Final Color Render. Final look of said assignment. I think I captured the heat and look of lava quite well. A first for me, actually. Always had trouble setting up the correct color pallet and design for lava. Who knew that doing the main concept in ZBrush would be the best course of action. 

As a whole, there wasn't too many problems I encountered. I already expected there to be seams to fix when I imported these lovely files into Photoshop. It is rare, from what I've seen, to not have to fix seams for a tile texture.

Of course, that wasn't a problem to fix. Perhaps the only annoying problem was what was mentioned earlier in the post: ZBrush doing strange things and making me revert to a previous file. But then, that's what happens with technology. Things will eventually act strange, delete files, corrupt files, crash or just make things a pain to fix. Though all we have to do as artists is to make do with those issues and posh forward to make awesome digital pieces. 

See yeah next time~!