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

Chapter 9. Sci-Fi-Drone: Creating a Normal Map

By now, we've finished sculpting our drone with all the fine details, vents, and bolts. But how can we bring this million polygon model into a game engine? We can't just load it because the polygon count is way too high. But what we can do is transfer the high polygon detail into a texture called a normal map, which will simulate the details on a low resolution mesh.

By building the in-game mesh with UV coordinates in the beginning, we've already finished all the preliminary steps to create a normal map.

So in this chapter, we'll talk about textures in games, especially normal maps, to visually enhance our low-polygon drone inside a game engine.

We'll have a closer look at:

  • Textures in games

  • Different types of textures

  • Normal maps

  • Generating normal maps out of ZBrush