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

Time for action - working in 3D with "Tools"


In ZBrush, 3D models are called Tools as opposed to Documents, which are 2D or 2.5D images. The main difference is that tools are 3D models that can be rotated or scaled while working with them. Documents, as being images, are a flat representation with optional information stored in them.

  • Pressing Document | Save As will save our 2.5D work as a Document.

  • Pressing Tool | Save As will save our 3D work as a tool.

Let's see how this can affect our workflow.

  1. 1. Open the Lightbox by clicking on its button. In the Lightbox that opens, switch to the Tool tab and choose the Demohead.ZTL by double-clicking it.

    Note

    As you see, ZBrush's native format of saving 3D models(tools) is .Ztl.

    ZBrush Documents are saved as .Zbr.

  2. 2. If your Tool Palette isn't permanently visible in a Tray, open the tool palette in your right-hand side Tray.

  3. 3. Notice that the image of the cube in the Tool Palette is now replaced by an image of the chosen head. The highlighted and bigger...