Week 2: 2D3D - ZBrush, Dynamesh and ZRemesher

So for week two we are learning how to concept in ZBrush. Our assignment was to either layout a character and model four different body types, or layout an environment and layout four different layouts. Since I am most interested in environments, I choose the latter.

I began by sculpting a quick flat land with apparent mountains in the background. I learned Dynamesh by using it on the landmass to keep correcting the topology.

After I was happy with the topology, we learned ZRemesher to clean up the topology even more. 

At this point, I decided to start build models of buildings that was taught on ZBrush Central. It was a great and fun technique! Since this piece is only used for a concept piece, I created five different buildings of varying sizes and shapes.

I laid out these five buildings in four different city positions according to my capstone games reference city: Kowloon. For a quick reference, Kowloon was a city near Hong Kong laid out in a square pattern and extremely crowded. Kowloon is on a desert area, but mountains and small foliage can be seen from the city. It was certainly and interesting sight to see! A huge city of stacked buildings on top of each other in the middle of no where.

Our team knows we want this layout of a city in a rectangular shape, so I worked on creating different building patterns inside the city.

To make this process easier, after attempting to use the transpose tool in ZBrush, I learned that it isn't efficient and is quite cumbersome and frustrating for what I wanted to do. At this point, I exported the landscape and the five buildings into Maya and used live trace on the landscape to quickly layout and plan new buildings and city patterns.

After finishing the four different city layouts, I took screenshots of them in their grey state.

This layout is just a generic full layout of a city.

This layout I made more circular and in the pattern of a summoning circle with a star pattern in the middle.

This pattern is a target or a rectangle. All the buildings are laid out in rectangles until the center which has a main building.

The final layout here shows a windmill pattern. This would designate a North, South, East and West part of the city with potential for parks or small ponds inside the city.

All together:

Finally, I pulled all the pictures into Photoshop and tried to color them a bit with colors that will be used. The colors should be muted, with a highlight color here and there. I did two "daylight" shots and two "night" shots.