This tutorial is an addendum to Steve Warner’s “There and Back” again. Read the “Big Honkin PDF file” first then try Steve’s tutorial second.
What do you do if you want to begin your modeling process in ZBrush from scratch and forget about importing objects from other apps. That sounds pretty easy. The catch is you want to export the finished model to another app for: animation, rendering etc. Starting with ZSphere’s can create some odd problems, for example.
Pic 1 is at SubD lvl 7. Looks pretty good at 417792 polys, all beat up and gnarly. Pic 2 is the same tool at SubD lvl 1. 103 polys is quite a big difference. From this point you can proceed with Steve’s tutorial and all seems well until you try to import and fix in LightWave. You get the result that’s in pic 3. 103 polys just isn’t enough for the normal map to create all the geometry it needs.
So what’s the fix. Here’s a simple solution that works pretty well. (If there’s a better way, by all means let me know!)
Step 1:
Make your ZSphere tool. Start simple at first. Here’s a male praying mantis after mating, I guess?!?
Step 2:
Ramp up the SubD levels till you like the sphere number, it seems to directly relate to the poly count. At this time make your big changes to the model. When you are finished playing 
export an Obj.
Step 3:
Now clear your canvas(init ZBrush, delete tool, whatever you do) and import the Obj you just exported. It will be imported with a nice size poly count relative to the Spheres from the ZSphere tool. 1008 is still pretty low. You may want to bump it up some more but I wasn’t planning on much detail this time.
Step 4:
Not really a step, beacuse now you follow Steve’s tutorial to the letter. So that’s the fix. Instead of importing an Obj from another app, you import an Obj from ZBrush. I’ll continue now. Here is the new age bean bag at SubD lvl 5. Quite a few polys to work with there now.
A few things I did differently from Steve. I work with a document size of 1280 x 1024. Doesn’t change the tool but the ZBrush interface is less aliased. I set all textures mentioned in the tutorial to 4096. I figure it gives better results. I haven’t actually tested it but I’m going by logic here.
Step 5:
My favorite part, play time. Still in Steve’s tutorial, this is the result after Projection Mapping. Yeah, I know, I have no idea what I was going for either. As it says just a bunch of random nonsense.
Step 6:
Once again this is still in Steve’s tutorial. Load all the goodies into LightWave, Obj file, 16-bit Tiff,… I guess that’s it. Apply the settings as stated and Voila, you’ve got yourself a fine… uhhh… thingamabob to enjoy for years to come. Not bad for 1008 polys.
The bands on the arms look pretty blocky, almost aliased but if you compare it to the ZBrush tool they both have that look. The only thing I would need now is more polygons (higher SubD lvl) in the ZBrush model to increase the resolution of the projection mapping but this is good for a test. FYI, I applied the tiff as a bump map like the tutorial says and it created a mess of artifacts all over the model. I got rid of it and didn’t notice a difference in quality, just the artifacts were gone. I didn’t worry about it after that. My results were to successful for that.
I assume the process would be the same in other apps, but you know what they say about assuming.
Well, I hope this helps someone,
Wyatt
