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

Simulating details with normal maps


Because we can't smoothly display our high-poly models with millions of polygons in games, we can make use of normal maps; they will mimic the high-polygon details on the low-polygon surface by simulating the lighting of the high-polygon surface. We can think of normal maps like painting light and shadow on paper. The paper resembling the polygon remains flat, but by looking at it, we think that it has elevated parts that cast shadows onto it. This effect is calculated by the engine on the fly, so it can react to changes in the lighting direction. Like with a sheet of paper, the polygons will still remain flat, so if viewed from the side, there won't be any elevated details visible. By looking closely, you can spot the difference between normal-mapped low-poly and high-poly meshes at the edges of the model.

The following screenshot shows the normal map of the drone applied to a simple plane under different lighting conditions:

We can see in the previous...