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View Full Version : Zbrush to C4D R11 stills for old school artist

shokan
09-27-2008, 08:47 PM
For stills in C4D R11:

1) Will Cinema 4D have trouble with importing and handling dense meshes from Zbrush? There will be lots of Xfrog trees in the same scenes.

2) Should I paint in ZBrush before export, or should I use Bodypaint once in C4D? Someone told me it doesn't matter and it's a matter of preference. Trouble is, I don't know what my preference is. Easy to do with great quality sounds good. I only have old school traditional media illustration experience and am envisioning complex antique interiors with photorealistic results.

3) In your opinion, would I be better off considering XSI 7 (instead of C4D r11) for the above because of its Gigapolygon core for heavy poly counts I may be dealing with? I'm scared of Mental Ray after reading about it compared to simpler C4D or modo, for example.

'preciate your help.
Erik Heyninck
09-27-2008, 09:20 PM
The idea is to create maps in ZBrush for displacement etc and use these in, for example, cinema. So much depends on the quality of the displacement feature in the rendering application.

This said, it's best to create a base-mesh in, say, Cinema, prefreably all quads,and with a good UVMap, then export it as obj to ZBrush etc etc. This has been covered several times. Spanki (Keith Young) the creator of the swiss army knife "Riptide" has a complete overview on his site.

One thing you have to take care about is how large that base map is. If you're on a 32bit system with 2gig of ram, you can use up to 4million polys in ZBrush. This is a 2000x2000map for export when you count one poly per pixel. So don't start with a basemesh of 10.000pixels.

I can't say anything about c11 as I don't have that one, but up to 10.1 Cinema's AR is not what one might call a champion of displacements. VRay or Maxwell may be really better. Fry is for displacements a bitnitpicky: one setting a bit too high and it can render for hours.
Per-Anders
09-27-2008, 09:23 PM
1) Less than most other packages, C4D is fast at opening them up, but there wouldn't be much point in doing so, the beauty of working with z-brush is in bringing in low res meshes that you then apply displacement to.

2) Yes it is user preference, you should download the demoes and see for yourself what works best, the tools are just tools though if you want photorealism then it's up to your own skills to achieve that.

3) Not if you want to use XFrog. XSI will handle more polygons faster in viewport than C4D, but neither XSI nor C4D are ideally set up to handle the sorts of polycounts that z-brush handles with ease. Again download the demos and try these things for yourself.
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