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

Summary


We just did the final step to store all the detail of our sculpting in a normal map to view the results in any game engine, and simultaneously saving a lot of performance. We've also learned a lot about textures in games in general, especially about normal maps.

In this chapter, we saw that:

  • Texture sizes are determined by a power of two, that is, 256 x 256 pixels or even 256 x 512, depending on the game engine.

  • Games use several types of textures to save performance. The most common ones are diffuse, normal, and specular maps

  • Normal maps can simulate highly detailed areas on flat polygonal objects with highlights and shadows.

  • We can easily create normal maps from our high-poly object onto our low-poly object in ZBrush. Just set the texture dimensions, the quality, and the space and you're done.

  • We mainly use tangent space normal maps, so we can tile the textures and animate the models.

That's it; we've finished our second modeling task, from modeling a high-poly model to baking a normal...