This zombie skeleton was basically a Halloween proof of concept for a personal project I was thinking about. What I originally wanted was a much larger scene with a handful of military soldiers battle-ing a wave of zombies. Alas, my eyes were too big for the time allotted and I didn’t have time to flesh out my whole, epic scene that I had in mind so, I just took this guy and finished him off as to show the look, feel and quality I was going for. One day, perhaps the whole battle can take place.

This was a another departure, one that I like to take quite often and that is to go about creating something in a way that is not the norm. In this case, I did not model this abstract piece with polygons but rather it is a image turned into a 3D mesh. There are many names for this depending on what program you are using. Nowadays, most 3D programs would call this a Displacement map.

LONG ago they were called G2H (grayscale to height) and if you are using a landscape generation program (Bryce, Terragen, Vue) you might import one called a DEM (Digital Elevation Map) and the resulting mesh in said programs would probably just be referred to as a “Terrain”.

The difference between a what a Displacement Map does and a “Terrain” is that a Displacement Map will displace (morph) an existing 3D mesh’s surface in any direction, while G2H/DEM is creating a 3D mesh based upon the image and with an image you only get creation on the Y axis, meaning up and down (height, elevation, etc) So, it’s limiting but still can be fun as in, anything I draw in Photoshop can be turned into a 3D mesh. Sure with limitations, but it leads to some bizarre/fun  experimentation’s.

To be simple, a G2H/DEM Map is a grayscale (black and white) image. Any image can be used but ones with a greater amount of levels of gray are desired because this will give a better, smoother, more complex resulting mesh. I’m not going to get into it here (as it is a loooong explanation) but the best images for doing this are what are referred to as 16-bit grayscale and they can come in a handful of image format extensions, but one of the most common is .tif. The 16-bit part means they can have up to 65,535 levels of gray versus a .jpg which can only carry a maximum of 255 levels.

When turning an image into a mesh, its simple; lighter parts of an image result in higher areas of the resulting mesh, darker parts of the image produce lower areas.

So, back to the render and in very short order; I used a 2D program called Filter Forge and I tweaked a preset called “Truchet Tiling“. I rendered out the preset with Filter Forge set to render just the Bump Map at 2K. This gave me a grayscale looking image (it’s actually color). I took the image into Photoshop and manipulated it so I would have the various sections separated out so each section then could be turned into seperate 3D meshes, so I could apply different materials (textures, shaders, etc) to each one. Also in Photoshop, I had added a bright circle gradient on top of each seperate section as to produce the rising cone area in the 3D mesh.

I turned the images into meshes, applied various procedural shaders and rendered.

In a small, convoluted nutshell, that’s it, lol.

All the 3D meshes in here I created in the freeware program TopMod. It’s is not a user friendly program but those of you that are into the hardcore polygonal modeling might be able to wrap your head around it. Admittedly, I followed some online tutorials (more than once) on how to create the models I rendered in here. And, these models and renders of mine are crap compared to the beauty renders that exist elsewhere, lol. All in all, its a challenging program but very satisfying when you do catch on and it can create some very tight 3D meshes!

TopMod – As of this writing they are renovating their site.

TopMod Download – Get yer TopMod program here!

TopMod video tutorials on YouTube.

Google Image search “TopMod” – Amazing renders, check’em out.