Since ZBrush was released, it dramatically changed the way game art is created. It is unmatched in its speed for creating highly detailed models and thus, is widely used in the games and film industry. We could even say that if you want to be a game artist today, ZBrush is considered a standard.
A few years ago, ZBrush was used only for organic modeling. With ZBrush 4.0 this changed dramatically and you can now sculpt mechanical spaceships as well as organic creatures. And that's exactly what we're going to do — in the course of this book we'll complete four modeling tasks, covering the complete range of organic and mechanical sculpting. After you've completed this book, you will know all the techniques necessary to sculpt detailed game assets and view it in a game engine of your choice.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, will cover all the preparatory steps of working with ZBrush. We'll get a quick overview about what we will learn in this book and how ZBrush is used in a model creation process. After that we'll quickly go over the basic terminology and finally talk about working in the field of digital art.
Chapter 2, Learning the Interface, will introduce you to the interface and the basic modeling concepts in ZBrush. After we're done with that, we are ready to start our first model in the next chapter.
Chapter 3, Modeling a Spooky Tree with ZSpheres, deals with model creation from ZSpheres in ZBrush. This is a powerful technique in ZBrush that's very useful for quickly blocking out volumes for our models. We'll use it to create a spooky tree from scratch and finally prepare it for sculpting in the next chapter.
Chapter 4, Adding Details to the Tree, covers the sculpting features of ZBrush. In this chapter, we'll take our tree from a rough model to the final stage. We'll learn about the different brushes in ZBrush and how we can use them to detail our model of the tree.
Chapter 5, Texturing the Tree with Polypaint, shows how we can texturize our models inside ZBrush. The cool thing is that in ZBrush we can paint our colors directly onto the model, which is a lot more fun than painting textures in a 2D image editor. We'll also take advantage of all the sculpted details and use them to quickly add color variations to our model.
Chapter 6, Adding an Environment to the Tree, will introduce subtools to compose a model out of multiple parts. We'll add a hill for the tree and detail it by adding some mushrooms and rocks.
Chapter 7, Modeling a Sci-Fi Drone, will introduce a new workflow, starting a model in an external modeling application such as Blender. We'll then see how we can transfer models between ZBrush and other modeling software.
Chapter 8, Sci-Fi-Drone: Hard Surface Sculpting, covers the new mechanical sculpting techniques of ZBrush. In this chapter, we'll finish our second model and learn a lot about detailing mechanical objects with the new brushes.
Chapter 9, Sci-Fi-Drone: Creating a Normal Map, discusses the different texture types commonly used in games. After that we'll take our detailed drone from the previous chapter and create a normal map from it so we can view all the fine details inside a game engine.
Chapter 10, Modeling a Creature with ZSketch, starts off with our third model — the brute. We'll use ZSketching to bring our character to life. This technique builds upon ZSpheres and allows us to paint muscles on top of a skeleton. This is incredibly fast for organic meshes. Once we're done with that, we'll convert our ZSketch into a mesh for further sculpting.
Chapter 11, Sculpting the Creature's Body, discusses the key steps involved in sculpting an organic creature. We'll have a closer look at sculpting anatomical details and will learn how to add additional props to our character, like a belt.
Chapter 12, Sculpting Fur and Accessories, introduces alphas to achieve realistic-looking material such as fur or feathers. We'll not only use alphas, but also talk about how to create custom alphas on our own. After that we'll use these custom alphas to add the final polish to our creature.
Chapter 13, Preparing the Creature for Games, covers the needed steps to bring our detailed creature from the last chapter into a game. This involves creating a low-poly version of it and transferring the surface details. Finally, we'll unwrap the creature so we can bake a normal map, like we did for the drone in Chapter 9.
Chapter 14, Modeling the Harvester Ship, will start off with our fourth model — the harvester ship. We'll start this complex spaceship directly inside ZBrush with a new technique called ShadowBox. This allows us to create mechanical shapes in no time, so we can assemble our complex ship. We'll then refine these shapes with the new clipping brushes that allow us to create crisp mechanical surfaces.
Chapter 15, Detailing the Harvester Ship, covers the creation of more complex parts like a clamshell with ShadowBox and the clipping brushes. We'll also use Booleans to combine or subtract meshes to create forms that were out of reach before.
Chapter 16, Finishing the Harvester Ship, will draw together all the techniques learned before to add the final polish to our ship. We'll also learn how we can grab sculpted geometry and use it as a brush to quickly add fine details.
This book is for aspiring (game-) artists who want to dig deeper into highly detailed game model production. It's good if you have a basic understanding of 3D and its possibilities and are also familiar with other 3D-software like Maya, 3D-Studio Max, Softimage, Blender, and others, which are good companions for ZBrush. Also, for someone looking for a more intuitive way of creating 3D models, this book and ZBrush are the right tools to start with.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning:
Code words in text are shown as follows: "So we'll concentrate on the .obj format, which can be read by almost any 3D application."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes, for example, appear in the text like this: "Pick the Move brush and make sure that the fur forms a closed volume around the body, as shown in the next screenshot ".
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