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 an alpha for the fur


As mentioned earlier, this example is only a short breakdown of the steps I used to create the alpha in GIMP. You'll have to apply these steps to the image editor of your choice:

  1. 1. First search for some references. The following image can be found on wikimedia if you look for "emu". (Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Emu_showing_feet.jpg (Photo by Flickr user Aenneken, under Creative Commons Attribution License))

  2. 2. Pick an area that resembles the structure of the fur well. To do that, either crop the image, or create a new one from the selection.

  3. 3. Convert it to a grayscale image. You may also increase the contrast.

  4. 4. Check the size of the alpha you're going to create. Something between 100 and 300 pixels in width and height should be fine, depending on whether you plan to use it for smaller or larger details. In our case, the alpha is 168 x 300 pixels large. Since ZBrush version 4.0, non-square alphas are supported...