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

Have a go hero - adding final shading with Ambient Occlusion


In the Tool | Masking subpalette, we can find another masking option, Mask Ambient Occlusion. The next screenshot shows how Ambient Occlusion and Cavity Mask differ. To put it simply, the Ambient Occlusion masking gives more of a global masking, taking into consideration which parts of the mesh occlude others, whereas the Cavity Masking shows the contrasts between peaks and valleys on our surface, ignoring the overall mesh structure.

Note that both calculations are independent from any lighting, as their calculation depends on the mesh only.

As we can see, the cavity masking highlights the smaller surface details, whereas the Ambient Occlusion masking enhances the shading by clarifying the overall mesh structure for the viewer.

We already used the Cavity Masking for the small structures, so let's add some final shading with Ambient Occlusion masking:

  1. 1. Masking Ambient Occlusion can take quite a long time, so you may want to step...