Hey everyone. Just wanted to update you about a project I'd been working on. Turns out, I hadn't enough time these past couple weeks to complete the entire Skull Entrance Graveyard I wanted to release for Halloween. However, I did quickly put together another model, which I'll release for free in the next day or two. Keep an eye out for this one. It will be part of a smaller set, which will make for a spooky Halloween render. Here's a simple screen-cap of the painted diffuse, and wireframe of the "Haunted Tree" set.

If you've been following my Renderosity thread about the Skull Entrance Graveyard, this is a model you haven't seen yet, and was originally going to be part of that set. With Halloween approaching, I wanted to release something for the occasion, so instead, I'll make this model part of a smaller, independent freebie. Hope you like it. Keep an eye on my profile for this in the next 24 to 48 hrs.

Recent Status Update: The final scene is put together, and ready for export. This is the most time consuming part of the process, so I expect it to be ready for download in the next day or so; certainly well before the Halloween weekend. Anyway, here is a quick screencap of the scene from the 3dsmax viewport. No scene lights, or anything special here. This is just to show the layout; you can see the polycount information in the upper left. The scene is relatively light on polygons, and depends on textures and normal maps for most of the fine detail. I'll post actual production renders when I release the scene.

As you can see, it's a rather large set, but with all detail "baked" into the normal maps and textures, the polygons are low enough to work well on most machines, even with some high polygon characters in the scene.

This is looking just to kool, and may well be perfect for a story I am working on.

I agree with ldgilman. This is a very cook scene, and should be very versatile for a bunch of different Halloween style renders. I could use this for a scene I had in mind for a while now too. All I ask, when you package this, is that all the objects can be loaded separately, if possible. This will make it much easier to customize for whatever our needs may be.

That's a very nice piece of work.

Looks very good Lux, What's the idea behind it all being placed on a mound?

airflamesred posted at 10:43AM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236123

Looks very good Lux, What's the idea behind it all being placed on a mound?

It's for convenient render purposes. Most people won't have full environments to place this, and a simple ground plane needs some kind of border to look complete, or else it will appear to "cut off", if it's not an infinite plane. This can be handled typically with clever camera angles, etc. But placing it on a hill like this will allow most novice users freedom in using almost any camera angle, without the appearance of a "cutoff" horizon.

Here's the complete set for download:

Evil Tree - Full Set

This is an impressive package. I love the skull model, and will use that often on it's own I'm sure! Excellent modelling! Can't believe how low the poly count is overall, considering the scale of the scene. Thanks!

maxxxmodelz posted at 4:23PM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236189

This is an impressive package. I love the skull model, and will use that often on it's own I'm sure! Excellent modelling! Can't believe how low the poly count is overall, considering the scale of the scene. Thanks!

Thanks. One interesting tidbit we could potentially discuss here in the forum is in regard to topology. The tree in this scene, for example, was created with the auto-topology tools in 3d-Coat, over a sculpted voxel mesh. This presented some issues later on in the workflow that I should have anticipated. Because the geometry was not created with logical modeling techniques (in order to save time), the unwrapping of the mesh was much less efficient, and far less controlled than I would have liked. The auto-topo feature produced quad topology that, while worked fine to reproduce the sculpt in quads, produced edge loops that weren't logical, and wouldn't allow me to unwrap the object with the island placement of a typical polygonal mesh. This meant that I could not choose which parts of the model were unwrapped to it's own island, and I had very little to no control over the angles of the UV itself. Creating the object this way forced me to unwrap also with the "auto-unwrap" feature, which produced chaotic and random island placement that would have been unusable in an image editing software to paint the textures. Luckily, the painting tools in 3d Coat are extremely powerful, and rival Photoshop. So I was able to paint directly on the model, without worry about the seams on the UV template. However, editing the texture in the future will also need to be done back in 3d Coat. It wouldn't be possible to edit the UV's in something like Photoshop, because of the way the auto-unwrap placed the islands and texture coordinates. Compare the UV templates of the tree to something like the skull or the hill in this set, which I unwrapped with manual, traditional techniques. The skull UV template can be easily edited in any image editor by hand, if need be.

I think this is a great practical example of why topology is so important, and is still very relevant to the creation of a good model, especially for redistribution, or a production pipeline. I think this is why modeling things the traditional way, or doing retopology with a good understanding of edge flow, is still very important in the world of CG.

Ok, well that's interesting. I didn't know you created the tree that way, and that does bring up a good point of discussion. So what you are saying is that you sculpted the tree from voxels in 3dcoat, then retopologized it automatically? I didn't know 3dcoat could do that first of all. I know Zbrush has a feature that, when you go to retopologize it with the Z-remesher, you have the ability to control edge flow by placing lines where you think it should create edges. I guess this is where Zbrush is still ahead of the game, because it does allow you to control the edge flow, even with Z-remeshing.

maxxxmodelz posted at 11:27PM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236251

Ok, well that's interesting. I didn't know you created the tree that way, and that does bring up a good point of discussion. So what you are saying is that you sculpted the tree from voxels in 3dcoat, then retopologized it automatically? I didn't know 3dcoat could do that first of all. I know Zbrush has a feature that, when you go to retopologize it with the Z-remesher, you have the ability to control edge flow by placing lines where you think it should create edges. I guess this is where Zbrush is still ahead of the game, because it does allow you to control the edge flow, even with Z-remeshing.

Maxxx, 3d Coat does have the capability to define edge flow in it's autotopo feature. Just the same as the ZBrush Zremesher, 3d Coat has a "strokes" feature that allows you to define how you'd like the algorithm to direct the flow of edge loops in the topology. That's usually fine for some models, and can result in some good topology, but you're still leaving a lot of things to chance, and the accuracy of the algorithm still depends on the complexity of your sculpt. In the case of this tree, for example, there were just too many extrusions and changes over the surface area to get the result I would have liked, even using the strokes tool. Still, I'm happy with the overall result, but I'm glad this wasn't something that would need changes to the texture "downstream" in the pipeline. If this were a model that may have needed texture changes later on, I would have definitely chose to model it using traditional polygonal modeling techniques.