ATI’s NormalMapper is a great Free tool. I work with this tool allot (mainly cuase I helped develop the tool).
But the advantage of Zbrush is the fact that you have a very fast way to manipulate huge amounts of geometry. If you tried to do the same thing in a normal DCC app you will pull your hair out.
But there still are drawbacks in some instances where other tools will work better(ATI NormalMapper)
The thing with creating content for games using normal mapping techniques is ideal. Zbrush is a great tool also for creating NMaps. Virtually the same workflow.
The take home message would be that you need nice UVs before you create any normal maps, or highrez Geometry. And since Zbrush is basically a subd modeler(or the way it treats geometry subdivision), So knowing this you have to setup low rez geometry first, and UVs.
I personally would never use the ZSphere(aka metabals) system becuase of the lack of controll with the low rez topology, and texture space.
And Zbrush is not a good tool for UV creation/layout. It will do things like page UVs much like a lightmap would be created in many game engines. This is not ideal by anymeans. The fewer breaks in tangent space and the less that tangent space is distorted is always better espicially for realtime aplications.
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