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

Textures in games


Textures are images applied to 3D objects. In games, most of the texture sizes are a "power of two", so typical sizes are 256 x 256, 512 x 512, or 1024 x 1024 pixels.

In modern games, there are several types of textures that affect the look of the model in the engine. The idea behind having that many textures in games is, like always, the need for saving performance. The following three are the most commonly used types:

  • Color/diffuse maps are the most basic textures determining the base color of the object, most of the time ignoring any lighting direction. This is what we did by polypainting the tree at the beginning of the book.

  • Normal maps are used to simulate high polygon details on a low polygon model by dynamically simulating light and shadow on the surface. You've probably seen them before because they can easily be spotted by the dominance of purple colors. Most of the time, normal maps are generated by software, opposed to handmade color and specular maps.

  • Specular...