Plugin developers and Digital Tutors

[luchifer]

Hello, I was wondering if plugin developers should contact digital tutors, to do some tutorials about ICE and Exocortex for example, so it would be more widely exposed and hopefully purchased and used.. like the recent digital tutors tutorial Creative Development: "Sculpting a Fantasy Monster in ZBrush and Softimage with Szabolcs Matefy" who uses the Species plugin to quickly model a female body, rigged and posed very very fast (http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/trainin ... autoplay=1)

Im thinking, its a good way to expose some of the amazing plugins that are for Softimage and it could also advertise a little more our beloved XSI.


edit: edited some spell issues and I have to add that I do not work for DT (My post seems like and advertising)

Newcomer (<20 posts) alert: please use the URL tags - HB

[EricTRocks]

Hey,

Chris and I were very happily surprised to see this new training using Species. We didn't even know until you posted it. I'm even more of a fan because they got someone from the industry to create the set of videos which I think is something that is missing from the DT training. Actual people working in production producing the content. I'm hoping that they push a lot more for this. Not sure if DT has ever reached out to Exocortex either but maybe you could send them a message asking them to do so to get more training video created using their tools.

Chris and I have put together a bunch of videos for Species though that should give users a full understanding of how to use the system here:
https://vimeo.com/groups/species

[luchifer]

Nice! Im at 40% of the tutorial, and he has used Species to create the medusa girl, its a very fast plugin, he made the girl character in 5 minutes, edited the body, etc.. and hehe you are the author so I dont know why am explaining the plugin to you... im just excited because its a very nice plugin (and at the same time saddened because the company I work dont do any kind of character animation) He also used Power Extrude for the bow and the string, and (I think its his own ICE compound) an ICE braid system, who I believe use ICE strands to make the belt of the medusa character.

Im gonna write on the DT forums right now.

[gustavoeb]

I dont know why am explaining the plugin to you

Lol

He also used Power Extrude for the bow and the string

Its actually Fabricio Chamon's and you cant find it for free ar http://rray.de

[j3st3r]

Heu,

I'm behind the tutorial...

And my intention was to highlight Species, as one of the most important tool in my workflow. I use it everyday, and it saved me literally days of production.

In the next tutorial (if there will be) I'll use Species again, and more ICE...I love Softimage and ZBrush...they work together really well, and safe if used as directed

Cheers


Szabolcs

[luchifer]

Hi, I want to say thanks for the tutorial. If I may ask, is it possible to do the snake hair using mudbox? I ask this because im not very proficient with Zbrush and I use Mudbox more often, although after the tutorial, Im gonna try to get better with Zbrush. Also I had a couple more questions, is it recommended to sculpt the body for animation? or that would bring problems with polygon count or muscles that dont follow a natural behavior?

[j3st3r]

At this moment Mudbox doesn't have such features (zSphere, zSketch, Dynamesh, etc) that supports this workflow, you should model the snakes indivually, and assemble them, and the sculpt them.

My workflow is to sculpt everything, and then rebuild the mesh for animation. If you have a good sculpt it's lot easier to create a good topology model for animation, and use the sculpt for displacement map. Pure polygonal models tend to be too "mechanic" against a sculptured model. So, in my opinion create your sculpture, and then build (retopo) a reasonable dense mesh for animation.

Of course, if you use a base mesh (as I did) you might bake the displacement maps back to your base mesh (if it's dense enough). You might also subdivide the mesh and shrink wrap onto the high res model.

Back to mudbox, I'd give a chance to ZBrush, it's lot more than you might think.

Cheers