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

The Harvester


The Harvester is the mother ship of the Pioneer Drone that we built previously. It is meant to control the drones and use them to harvest resources.

When creating the drone, we used a previously built base mesh we detailed afterwards. With The Harvester, we'll now explore a new technique, introduced with ZBrush 4.0 — ShadowBox. This allows us to create a model by painting a cross section of all three sides. The next screenshot illustrates this principle. It may look confusing at the beginning, but once you get your head around it, blocking out mechanical models has never been easier. And it's tons of fun, really:

As you can see, the model is created by painting masks on all three sides of shadow box. Drawing masks goes quite fast, allowing us to do quick iterations in design. Let's see this technique in action.