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

Time for action - creating a normal map for our drone


Okay, we have our high-polygon object and our low-polygon object with UV coordinates ready, and we would like to view it in real-time in a game engine. Let's see how we can transfer fine details onto our low-poly drone with normal maps in ZBrush.

So, what we want to do is create a normal map and export it so that we can use it in our engine:

  1. 1. Open the latest version of the drone.

  2. 2. Step down to the lowest level of subdivision.

  3. 3. Make sure that Tool | UV Map | UV Map Size is set to 1024, which are the dimensions of the texture in pixels in width and height.

  4. 4. Expand the Tool | Normal Map subpalette.

  5. 5. Enable Tangent, Adaptive, and SmoothUV, as the next screenshot shows:

  6. 6. Click on the Create NormalMap button — this will incorporate only the visible layers. Check the Notebar to see the generation progressing, as the subsequent screenshot shows:

  7. 7. If this takes too long, you can cancel the process by pressing the Esc key. Turning off Adaptive...