Goodbye ZBrush hello XSI

Recently I had the opportunity to look at XSI, and evaluated its gigapolygon core, it certainly impressed. While it's not our dcc of choice for the moment, I can see that it has because of this architecture, well some interesting possibilities. But a thought, inspired by a question, occurred to me, that is, why not use this gigapolygon core architecture to do built-in ZBrush work?

So here we go...

1. create a white image, say 1024x1024 in your paint program, save it out. We'll call it White.psd
2. create a sphere change the subdivisions to 12 and 12 [ note: see magic 12 ;-) ]
3. open the geometry approximation window
4. change the render level to 3
5. create a uv for the sphere, pick spherical (why it doesn't automatically do this??)
6. In one of the quad views, change one to fx tree, and the other to fx viewer
7. open the image clip windows and import white.psd
8. from the fx tree window, select clips, and then white_psd
9. open the render tree and select from clips white_psd
10. connect this into displacement of the scene material
11. change the Scalar_Image to use the created (5) uv map
12. from the fx tree choose ops then paint
13. connect the paint op into the white_psd
14. from the fx viewer choose the brush you would like to use.
15. get painting and see the results a render preview window.

• Now you can paint onto the clip in the fx viewer anything you want. (Grayscale only, as were painting displacements)
• You can also use the brushes in the brush menu too, all of them can be used here.
• You can also change the ops, paint, in (12), to a vector if you so wish and introduce others too.
• If you create a render preview window covering the sphere, you'll see it update as you paint.
• One useful thing was I created was a real-time shader for displacement, by doing that way you don't need the render preview thing, but you have to change the OGL level instead of the render level, as in (4), and the updates are automatically displayed in the camera window. Sweet.

The workflow is the same as painting a uv texture in any paint program, so that's good as you maybe you understand that workflow. The only difference is now you're doing it with displacements, and getting real-time updates, all inside XSI. There maybe a way to extend this procedure to overlay the uv texture, so as to see clearly what your painting and where.

One thought did occur to me, but I can't find the information, is that of adding new brushes to the brush menu, i.e. photoshop brushes.

If XSI could do that either now or in the future, well it would open lots of possibilities. As i said I couldn't find a way to import photoshop brushes, and time is/was limited. So you might want to take a look at that yourself, but as I said in the preamble, if it could it would be great.

Lastly and most importantly, there maybe, and probably are better ways to do this, I'm not an XSI expert. But I'd thought I'd share this just incase you didn't know XSI could do this. Have fun.