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

What is Polypainting?


Polypainting lets us apply color onto our model on a per vertex basis. This is also commonly referred to as vertex colors in other 3D programs or game engines.

When using Polypaint, each vertex holds color and material information we can paint. This means the amount of detail we can paint depends on the amount of vertices we have.

For example, in a texture map, each pixel holds color information similar to each vertex we can paint. A typical game texture size would be 1024 x 1024 pixels, which is around one million pixels in total. So if we want to cover the same amount of detail as a 1024 x 1024 texture, we would need at least one million vertices. This is the reason why we always polypaint at the highest level of subdivision where we have the maximum amount of vertices available.

Note

Remember, you can just hover over your active tool in the tool palette to view the vertex- and polygon count.