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 - isolating parts of the tree with Polygroups


In the last chapter, we've touched on having automatically generated Polygroups of our ZSphere model. We can use them for isolating parts of the mesh.

  1. 1. Load the model of the tree.

  2. 2. Activate Draw Polyframe by clicking on its button in the shelf on the right. You can also use the hotkey, which is Shift + F.

  3. 3. Our mesh now appears colored. Each color represents a Polygroup that ZBrush created from the structure of our ZSpheres.

  4. 4. We can now isolate polygroups to reveal roots, which are partly hidden by others. To do so, hold Ctrl + Shift and left-click on a Polygroup to isolate it. This will hide all other Polygroups.

  5. 5. To make everything visible again, Ctrl + Shift + left-click on an unoccupied area of the canvas.

What just happened?

We've just found another advantage of working with ZSpheres, automatically generated Polygroups! This is very handy if the mesh has overlapping forms, like our roots do.

Note that hiding parts of the...