ZBrushCentral

zBrush on the....iPhone?

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That’s right, the iPhone. A while back a company I work for Appetizer Mobile was contracted by the NBA to create virtual bobble head dolls for several basketball players. The iPhone is of course limited on what it can display but I found zBrush extremely useful when creating the head models for these characters.

MY WORKFLOW

I would start with a basic head model that I created in a fairly generic shaping at the final polycount I was looking for (roughly 4,000 polygons). I would import that model into zBrush and subdivide the model up to a million or so polygons. Some characters that required baking of a normal map to achieve more detail I would go to the next subd level.

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I would then use the IMAGE PLANE plugin to load up a customized reference image from the reference material they provided us with. From there I would shape the model to match the features of that particular character.

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Once I was finished with the shape of the model I would turn on Colorize in the texture panel and use App-Link to project the texture from the photo references that were provided.

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After getting the texture roughed out I would export everything and import the new model into 3ds Max. I took the exported texture into Photoshop and fixed any errors and/or filled out the rest of the areas. Once I had my basic texture I would apply it to the model in Max and bake the lighting into a new texture (since the iPhone is limited).

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From there the model was sent off to our programmer Roman Dzieciol to import into our engine to be viewed on the iPhone. The background and body were all done in Photoshop.

I hope you enjoyed this as zBrush really helped my workflow for this project (as it continues to do for the ones I’m currently working on). You can view all 21 of the NBA characters we did on iTunes and they are also available on the Android platform.

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Attachments

banner.jpg

zbrush-frame.jpg

zbrush-model.jpg

zbrush-texture.jpg

max-1.jpg

Thanks for posting that. It’s cool to see z-brush being used for such a small screen handheld. Lots of potential…

Very cool :slight_smile: