ZBrushCentral

process of modeling between external and zbrush?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi again,

Thanks to Aurick for answering my question about persp in zbrush. Now one a little more difficult.

So i’ve been learning alot more about zbrush, reading a lot of tutorials and done a few practice busts. Now I want to try and make a final polished sculpt and make it all pretty to render in maya. Trouble is, i dont know how to start. I’ve been reading that alot of people model a basemesh in their external 3d programs first…I’m assuming this is to get correct topology first and then they add in final sculpts in zbrush.

I modeled a head in zbrush, but when i exported into maya it was far too high res to handle and so it crashed. Does retopoligizing fix this? I’ve seen that exporting a low res mesh and creating normal maps will fake a nice high res. But my graphic card wont let me use zmapper. So i’m hoping i can bypass that for now.

I guess the process differs when making a game model or a film production model.

Sorry if this is confusing and several questions but i’m pretty confused on the process of making something.

#2

you need to generate displacement maps if you want the same thing inside of maya

or you could get XSI and actually import a 4million polygon mesh. then you dont’ have to worry about generating a displacement map.

also, you will still want to have a normal map, even in conjunction with the displacement map. Unless you like really long render times that is.

Since you can’t create one in Zmapper due to your graphics card…
You can use nvidea’s photoshop plugin to create a normal from your displacement map, or Crazybump, or Xnormal, and probably a ton others.

You will use a displacement map at a mid resolution to generate the actual silhouette changes, and then a normal map for the high frequency details.