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

Creating alphas for feathers and fur


Following the concept, our character should have some fur as well as feathers. So, we'll try to get a smooth transition from a feathered head to a furry chest and back. To create convincing fur and feathers, we'll create custom alphas for each:

Alphas are just grayscale images, so we can easily create our own in any image editor. As this is not ZBrush-specific, here's only a short breakdown of how to create the alphas for the feathers and fur. This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but rather an explanation of how to build custom alphas to create more realistic sculptures. You are encouraged to create your own alpha, but you can also download both of them by following the link at the end of this section.

First, let's have a look at the existing alphas to better understand how they work. Here are two examples that come along with ZBrush. The first one is the alpha of the Snake brush, found in the brush list. The second one is the ScalesFish brush that can...