I have posted my GDC talk at http://www.polygonmine.com/gdc/gdcSlides.html. It deals with high-res asset creation and parts of it should be interesting for Zbrush beginners: normal/displacement map terminology, and a video about basic Zbrush concepts (brush tools, Projection Master etc.), common Zbrush problems (although I refer people to this forum for real help ;)) There’s also a section on scanning maquettes.
Andreseloy
Sweet!!!
Thankyou!
Pilou
Thanks! Now I finaly know what the channels in normal maps are used for 8-).
LemonNado
GREAT PAGE
The whole GDC HTML is quite interesting. Although the third video shows the strengths, I feel the HTML could elaborate on these strengths more, as the potential pitfals of the placement inside the pipeline don’t dismiss the value of use age of ZBrush in the pipeline in the first place. These unique strenths are barely mentioned in a spirited, “Use it!” type phrase about Projection Master. A bit more detail would of been useful e.g. “Fast diversified 3D texturing…”
This lecture was obviously a large undertaking. And all in all looks to have been quite successful.
Here is the link to the download page for his videos. The THIRD is a very good “Whirlwind Tour” of ZBrush. In particular the use of Projection Master. Liberal use of pause will be neccasary to learn from it as it goes a bit fast.
Thanks for the feedback!
One of the biggest problems I was facing with the lecture was scope. I could easily have done a full day tutorial on Zbrush alone, but ultimately I only had 45-50 minutes, half of which had to deal with the scanning approach. Deciding what material to present was tough because I wanted the topic to be broad enough to interest many people while still providing some actual, hands-on information.
I figured the best way to deal with it was to show people what Zbrush can do with a few live demonstrations, but I have to rely on the user to do follow-up research. Just nudging people in the right direction of the projection master (“I remember seeing this cool way of doing stuff, I better find out how to do it myself!”) seems worthwhile, I’ve seen too many artists totally ignore it because they didn’t understand its use. I added links to this forum, the Practical Guide and the Picasso tutorial so make the research easy.
Quite true. Showing is often better than telling.
I am in the middle of evaluating several 3D packages, Lightwave, 3DMax, XSI, etc. But there is no doubt that ZBrush will be used to great effect no matter what I use to generate my posable and detailed meshs. If I was only doing portraits I wouldn’t even need the other software.
Some of you might be interested to know that I will do a much updated version of this lecture at the San Francisco IGDA meeting in October. I will show how we made some of the assets featured in our Playstation 3 game (an early trailer of which can be found at http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/vids_1.html), and of course that involved a whole lot of Zbrush work (as well as scanning actual dragon maquettes).
More information is at http://www.igda.org/sf/ - if you live in the SF Bay Area, stop by the Metreon on October 4!
Try http://www.polygonmine.com/ instead. Forgot that I used the old domain here, Polymine.com is the one domain I let expire 
Speaking of which, http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051007/waugh_01.shtml has a comprehensive recap of the San Francisco talk from October 4.
Man, your level designs rock, I love your work, and thx for the neat explanation on normal mapping extraction.
Do you show your hypershade network on normal map, cause I’m using MR headus one, never tried doing it straight from maya plug, are there different ways to render normal maps ?
What’s the parallax map btw ??
THX again 