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

Texture coordinates


After finishing the in-game mesh, the next step is to unwrap the mesh to prepare it for texturing.

You've probably heard of images applied to models being referred to as textures before. To map these textures onto our mesh, we have to tell the game engine which pixel of the texture shall be mapped onto which polygon. This process is called unwrapping and produces flat representations of our 3D geometry. A texture can then be applied to the model according to this map.

The following screenshot shows the result of the unwrapping process of a human head. In this example, we can easily recognize a face since it's all made out of one piece:

This laid out mesh structure is also referred to as texture coordinates, UV-coordinates or just UVs.

Technical objects, like our Pioneer Drone don't offer that much of a continuous surface, so breaking it up into little pieces is unavoidable. As you can see, this also comes at the cost of clarity, as the following screenshot shows:

Note...