Reflections

I really enjoyed making the scene within Maya. This was fun and gave me a better knowledge towards the program. I had issues along the way, such as the fog and importing zbrush files into Maya.
I am glad I used zbrush although it limited my time, as it was VERY difficult to learn. Even teaching myself the user interface was....a nightmare. But Im happy to say I got pass that bump where you want to give up on a program and pushed through to where I want to learn more about it.

I kept things a little more simple than some of my other projects as I wanted to study Maya a bit more. In my previous projects I aimed real high and I never had that time to actually get to learn the software.

I am happy with the result of my scene, but truthfully sick of looking at it. I think I could have done better in my sculpture from zbrush, but again, not knowing the program, proved to be a huge factor in getting things completed and done to a high standard.

In Maya

I finally had my zbrush sculpt within Maya. I did have issues. Earlier I exported my UVs and Polypaint textures from zbrush into Maya for a test.  This was fine. I then continued painting on my sculpt in zbrush expecting my texture to update automatically. I then finished painting and went to export my Uv and texture only to realise they didn't exist anymore. This I couldn't understand. To counter this issue I had to create a new Uv for my sculpt and then copy my new polypaint from my non clone sculpt and paste it to my new uv'd sculpt.

Here are some images of my sculpt once brought into Maya and placed within my scene.

Here are a few rendered shots.

Displacement Map

I now had the issue of being able to import my sculpt to Maya but only in its lowest form of subdivisions. Therefore I need to also create a displacement map. Again, to do this I needed to find a tutorial online to see exactly what I was doing.

This is the tutorial I followed:

This was a great tutorial and helped with bringing in my displacement map to my sculpt.

Lighting

I thought I would give lighting a try in Zbrush, just had a little muck around.

Updated polypaint Images

Importing, Exporting

As I sculpted in Zbrush, I begun having fears of how my sculpt would be imported to Maya, as I had never exported anything out from Zbrush before.
To do this I needed to create a UV for my sculpt, this also included the polypaint. As I am new to Zbrush I had to find a tutorial with step by step insturctions to create UV's.
Zbrush has a great plugin called UV Master that basically allows the user to flatten their scult into UV's. There is little work needed and all I had to do was to paint the face of my scuplt to get it from being destroyed by the cutting of the UV. After the UV's are created I am easily able to export my file out of Zbrush and import it to Maya.
Here is the Youtube tutorial I followed.

                                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jl004CjUXk