Book Image

ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide

By : Manuel Scherer
Book Image

ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide

By: Manuel Scherer

Overview of this book

ZBrush is a fantastic tool for creating models for use in computer games. Using a wide range of powerful tools you can create models for vehicles, props, environments, and characters. This book makes creating game art in ZBrush fast and easy. It covers everything you need to create models of all kinds for your game projects, even if you've never used ZBrush before. Built around four complete ZBrush projects, the book gives you everything you need to sculpt props, vehicles, and creatures in ZBrush. You'll start by creating a "spooky tree" model, mastering the sculpting, texturing, and decoration skills that are essential for all ZBrush topics. Next you'll move to man-made objects with a sci-fi drone. Next you'll see how to sculpt monsters and other creatures, deal with cloth and other soft materials, and prepare the model to become an animated, controllable character in a game. The final project returns to machines, building a complete, detailed spaceship for use in your sci-fi games.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Retopologizing for games


Okay, we've got our high-poly mesh ready. But in order to bring it into a game engine, we need to build a low-polygon mesh from it. Because we used ZSketch in the beginning, we now create the low-poly mesh at the end of the process. This step is called retopologizing, or in most cases just retopo, because it creates a mesh with a new topology and projects the details from the high-poly onto it. In this way, we end up with a mesh with a clean and optimized topology and all of the high resolution details that we sculpted in earlier.

This process can also be done in other major 3D applications such as Blender, 3ds Max, and so on. Honestly, I would prefer the retopologizing in Blender over that of ZBrush, as I find it a bit more robust. Nonetheless, the results are the same. So let's see how we can do this in ZBrush.

Before retopologizing, we should be clear about these points:

  • Polycount: Think of how many polygons the character should have; this always seems tricky...