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Quads and Tris for normal mapping?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey Guys,

I have a quick question for all of you game modelers out there. So, I have been trying to learn Unreal and I know that Unreal’s Engine prefers tri verses quads. The question is this. So if you are making a base model in Maya that is then going to be finished off in Zbrush, Should you keep your model all quads? I know that Zbrush prefers quads over tris. So, is it best to keep it all quads from the beginning, and then once you are done setting everything back up in Maya, convert it over to tris. So, if you do convert a model that is going to be for a game engine does this impact the normal mapping generated in Zbrush on all quads? Any advice would be great. I am just starting to move more into the Game industry and wanted to know this basic fact.

Thanks in advanced

Bb

#2

Regardless of end output, you should be sculpting with quads in Zbrush. The sculpting results you’ll get from an abundance of tris will be terrible.

The best thing to do would be to sculpt on a mesh composed of evenly distributed square quads, then construct in Zbrush or elsewhere, a more deliberate mesh for the end output, and project the hi res detail onto that mesh.

#3

ZB you definitely want to stay quad friendly. I mostly stay in quads myself. For triangle-based engines, when I’ve need to test output, I often get out xNormal and use UV matching between High and Low res models to generate a normal map.

-K