The result of my render passes studies in Zbrush. I hope you like it.

This this the result of the first Zbrush try too. I export differents passes to Photohop direct from Zbrush. Nice option and really speed workflow. I get the Tipp from the book "ZBrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting" from Scott Spencer. Scott Patton get this way, first.

Here are the render passes for Ulf:

...and the details of the Photoshop file:

And the final result:
Ulf the mole, originally uploaded by David Le Cardinal.

I had fun with Zbrush again. I hope you like my new little sweet character.
Here the first results of retopology and polypainting:

Ulf the mole - Zbrush from David Le Cardinal on Vimeo.

I complete my 360° Panorama (show here). Now I use it for a new 3D Visualisation. The first Try can you see here. I was not really satisfied. So I split the rendering into several passes. So I get what I want with mental Ray in one rendering: Beauty, Matte, AO, Z-Depth, shadows and reflections. First, the final version with color correction in Photoshop.


Following, the different passes used:


Z-Depth (corrected in Photoshop)


Shadows Pass


Reflections Pass


Ambient Occlusion Pass


Matte pass

Summer time...

This is 3x speed shots on sand.
Panasonic DMC-LX2 - f/4.5 - 1/1000 - ISO 100




more photos on flickr

[Edit] ok here is the solution for the white spots:
The problem come from the photometric light as plane. The specular IS the problem.
- turn off specular on those lights
- create Omni lights for only the specular, and align to the photometric lights.
- adjust intensity, color as you want. That's it!

thanks for djulio74 on the french 3d-Station forum.

and the result:



Mental Ray and materials test. I used 3 photometric lights (plane) with mr-photograph exposure. There is 2 pass (beauty+occlusion) + z-pass (for the lens-blur effect) combined in Photoshop. Knows someone how I get out the white spots on the metal and glass shader?

How to import *.lwo files in 3ds Max without Lightwave?

Yesterday I get some 3D at this URL http://dmi.chez-alice.fr/models1.html. Exactly what I were looking for... but I get only *.lwo files... Arrrrg. Ok I asked my friend Google :) and this the way I get my model in 3ds max:
1. Download Accutrans 3D. It's a shareware, You can also try or buy (20$). First I try :)
2. Open your *.lwo in Accutrans 3D
3. Save as... what you want.

I tested different output file. First as *.obj... it won't work properly. 3DS works great (model 1 and 2 and the picture below). I get only strange black triangle in the viewport for the first model and only in the standard max setting. With Light and Shadow in the viewport it was perfect. Model 3 is exported as *.vrl. It smooth Groups.


Standard viewport

Standard viewport with hardware shadow

Quick render with mental ray

My Homemade pass-photo in 6 steps:
1 - I get the german reference for baby pass photo
2 - I take a picture from our lovely model with my digital camera (Panasonic DMC-LX2 | more about this camera). Then I adjust the size with my ref picture.
3 - I clean the background with the Clone Stamp Tool (S) with an average/small brush size (Hardness of 0%)
4 - With the same tool, I clean some smalls dirty dots (smaller brush size)
5 - I use the Unsharp Mask filter to get more details in the eyes and overall.
6 - And finaly I made small color correction with two adjustements layers. The first one was Photo Filter with an orange color (R=236 G=138 B=0) with density of 25%. The second filter was the Color Balance filter. I only change the midtones values.

That's all. It takes about 15 min to get a ready print pass photo.
The only thing that doesn't exactly match is lighting... whatever, it was fast :)