Looking good so far. One thing to keep in mind about the textures is that ornate wooden pieces like this usually get cut and carved along with the grain. Just something to keep in mind during texturing.

Hey John, check out my reply on that vid. I found a way to select all of those center plus-sign faces on each side of the cube shape at once, using similar select, instead of manually. While it's true that there's no immediately available way to select them at the face level, if you go down to vertex level, and select just one point in the upper corner of one of the faces, then choose "Amount Of Adjacent Vertices" from the Similar Select list, it will grab all those verts around the object. Then, with all those vertices still selected, just tap over into face mode again, and voila! All the proper faces will be selected! If you need me to show you a video of that, let me know, but it works! I haven't figured out the issue with having to rebuild the ngons yet unfortunately, but I'm looking into that one too.

Great tutorial, by the way.

Morkonan posted at 8:52AM Sat, 14 November 2015 - #4238297

Just a note: As used to be said quite often, "Poser only uses vertice normals to screw things up." In short, Poser doesn't use normals for anything. (Only speaking to the versions up to 2012 that I am familiar with.)

What can use normals, however, is the OpenGL renderer used in the Preview/Posing window. IF there are normals in an object file, it may try to use them. Otherwise, and more intrinsic to OpenGL, it will render faces dependent upon their "winding order" or, in other words, the order in which the vertices used to construct the faces were created.

So, in essence, no 3D object that is going to be used in Poser should be imported with normals. In fact, normals should be stripped from objects intended to be used in Poser, since they can take up a third of the file-size for a Wavefront object and serve no purpose in Poser other than to screw things up... There is, however, a "Normals Front" (Whatever it is) option in the Material Room. I suppose it's there just in case someone wants to screw up Poser with normals or, more likely, so that the Materials being rendered appear relative to the side of the face facing the camera in the rendering application... or something. In any event, it's not worth relying on to actually "do anything" in the Preview/Pose window, especially if a face's winding order is not in accordance with the normal that was generated for that face.

Exporting without normals information is a good idea for non-manifold objects. I wonder how will it affect objects that use tangent normal maps though? The "normals forward" in the material room is good for flat, single-sided objects that are rendering with inverted/flipped normals. For example, you have a single-sided, trans mapped leaf on a tree that is not rendering properly, because it's normals are "flipped". Using this option in the material room will essentially act similar to "double sided" or two-sided material options in other applications. According to the docs, Normals Forward will align all the surface normals to point forward. I assume they mean toward the camera? If so, then that's only useful for flat planar objects, and isn't truly a double-sided material behavior.

For previewing in viewport, you have the option to turn this on at the object level in Poser9 / 2012.

I agree with Xerxes0002, this one looks really good. I've seen all your other tutorials, but I'd still have no idea how to begin this one.

You should be able to follow those tutorials in Carrara, if it has splines. Blender has decent spline modeling, if all else fails.

I almost completely missed the .blend file! That's freaking great! Saves me a lot of time setting up the scene. Thanks! Yeah, I wish you released this sooner too. Would have made a great Halloween render for one of the contests.

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.

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!

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.

Daaannng. That's killer, Lux! Great details.

Wow. Those are great! Congrats, guys!

Wow! The gate is looking awesome.

Good link, Lux. Thanks!

Lux, check out my response to your latest thread in the 3d modelling forum, if you haven't yet. It's kind of related to this.

I'm with airflamesred. I'd like to see your pipeline workflow at some point. In particular, how you use 3dcoat in your process. I've downloaded the 3dcoat demo, but I can pretty much do everything I need right in Blender at this point, so I'm not so sure 3dcoat would be worth it for me.

I know you like the modelling tools in 3dsmax most of all, John, but have you tried the uv tools in Blender lately? I found them even easier and much faster than 3dsmax, and Blender also has the same projection painting features as 3dcoat. Without sounding like a Blender fanboy, I'm just curious what keeps you from going all-in with Blender?

Great job, John. The model is beautiful, and I'm impressed by the renders here.