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

Using ZBrush with other 3D applications


In the Tool Palette, next to the Load and Save buttons, we can find another magical set of buttons that allow us to import and export meshes into and from ZBrush.

If we click on one of them, we can see that ZBrush is looking for .obj files, as shown in the subsequent screenshot. Since ZBrush version 4.0, the GoZ and .ma files are available to exchange models even faster. But, at the time of writing, GoZ only supports a limited number of applications, such as Maya, 3DSMax, Modo, and Cinema4D. So we'll concentrate on the .obj format, which can be read by almost any 3D application. If you use one of the applications named above, feel free to give it a try anyway.

Note

The .obj format is used for exchanging models between ZBrush and other 3D applications. obj files only store mesh information, no animations, cameras, lights, and so on.

In our case, this format allows us to start the optimized, in-game mesh of the drone in an external application and bring...