ZBrushCentral

Can we render low poly game meshes in zBrush ?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

My arsenal zBrush 4 ,C4D basic 9.

I searched YouTube ,Google ,Central .All I’m sure of ,you can render low poly game meshes in Maya,Max.
Can we render low poly game meshes in zBrush ?

If we can anything important I need to know about rendering low poly game meshes in zBrush ?

Thanks.

#2

Yes and no.

You can sculpt in zbrush, and use it’s retopology tools along with UV master to create low-poly meshes that would be suitable for games. You can also use Projection Master to paint onto it’s texture afterwards. You can’t rig the model however, so you’ll still need another program to handle any animations (if you even require animations; if you’re just modeling a bench or something static then it should be fine).

You might also run into some limitations depending on your definition of low-poly. If you want something that’s really low-poly with a simple material (unlit or a basic diffuse), you’ll be ok. If you want to actually render out images to use more like a sprite or texture then you should also be ok as well. If you’re looking to create a current-gen game model however, Zbrush isn’t set up to let you see what your final low poly model would look like with normal and specular maps applied. What I would recommend doing at that stage is to instead switch to your game engine to preview the material and any changes made to the maps (which really gives you the ultimate idea of the end result anyway). You may want to use the free program xNormal for baking your normal maps as well so that you can have control over the projeciton cage, and set the tangent basis to match your engine. Zbrush can be used to paint a specular map, but I prefer photoshop or similar painting programs when it comes to painting purely in 2d.

There are also some minor things which you may or may not care about. ZBrush wont give you the ability to edit user normals for example. You will also be seeing a pretty faceted look to the low poly model (which can help establish the major planes), but wont be a good indication of what the mesh looks like with averaged smoothing (which might not even be an issue if you’re aiming for an unlit/ 100% texture look)