ZBrushCentral

About creating a lowpoly mechanical model (answered)

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello. I though of doing some lowpolygon mechanical model for a game engine (Unity in this case) now after learning organic modelling.

I haven't come across any tutorial of doing a detailed lowpoly robots/mechas or such so I decided to ask about methods here. 1. What would be the best method to unwrap UVs for pretty simple cubic objects? I did automatic UV Unwrapping in Maya for the object in the first image I attached and it works somewhat nicely except there was some twisting in the front. Would ZBrush's PUV tiles work since there's not much details going over faces? It would probably cause problems with mip mapping but I could always enlarge all edges in Photoshop.

The second image is formed of a bit more complicated cubic forms. What would be the best way to unwrap it?

2. Is there a way to use DragDot always with certain size even if you zoom in/out? (For sculpting screws) 3. Can I somehow rotate the view in ZBrush by 45 degrees or even less? Holding shift tilts just to 90 degrees. 4. As you can see in my image, the inflatted seams don't have smooth surfaces even if I sculpted with 4 million polygons. Is it just a matter of polygons or would there be some trick to slightly smooth those areas? Clicking the masked area while holding control smooths it too much resulting the edges to be no where like metallic. 5. Also after inflatting, the seams have a small peak at surface borders. Would there be a quick way to remove them except smoothing by hand?

Attachments

MetallicLeg.jpg

Example2.jpg

#2

  1. If you want absolute control then you would need to unwrap outside ZBrush but PUV tiles should work well for most purposes.

  2. The Adjust plugin, available from the Download Center, has buttons for storing and resetting the Draw size relative to model size. This is ideal for what you want.

  3. See here http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpost.php?p=712798&postcount=8 for a little plugin that will do this.

  4. As far as I can tell the jagged edges are through lack of polygons. Where the polygon flow is across an edge you will need a lot to avoid any roughness. You may find the Polish brushes good for cleaning edges.

  5. Not that I know of.

#3

Thanks Marcus. I’ll definitely get those plugins.

Would you have any suggestions which program could unwrap these kind of forms easily, if not automatically?

I’m gonna try those polish brushes but I think they’ll add pretty much work to the model. Gotta get more RAM for my next computer.

#4

I’m not familiar with UV mapping programs but Ultimate Unwrap 3D might be worth trying.

The second image you’ve posted looks good. You should do a BPR render to see how the edges really look - the Preview render is without anti-aliasing.

#5

Alright, thank you. I haven’t ever tried BPR rendering but I’ll test it out as well as some unwrapping programs.