ZBrushCentral

Zbrush to UDK workflow

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey guys, I’m a total newbie on Zbrush, but I honestly love this software, I mean when I learn and practice it I just enjoy it too much, way more then I would while gaming, but I have a few questions which watching videos on youtube and searching around didn’t really answer, and I would greatly appreciate it if you guys are able to help me out here! :smiley:

I have a small team of friends, and we’re developing a small side-scroller game on Unreal Development Kit, how we planned the workflow out was like this : Zbrush+Blender (Sculpting the characters, clothes, weapons, environment (stones, trees… etc)) > Maya (Animation) > UDK (Putting all of that in and creating the game).

My questions:
1- How does Texturing exactly work in Zbrush? I’ve looked around on the internet, but mostly people used the spotlight thing, whilst other people in other softwares like Maya, would edit the textures itself in Photoshop. (I also don’t completely understand what a UV is, I’m guessing it’s what you’re supposed to color in photoshop, yes?)

2- Now that I’ve created something (Like a sword I quickly sculpted) what am I supposed to do next? Texture it first, then Zremesh it, or is it the other way around?

3-I’ve read about Retopologizing (Which is Zremesh), and I understand that it lowers the quality of the sculpted model, so what I’m supposed to do is “Bake” the HighPoly into the low poly to make it retain the quality but still have low polygon count. How am I supposed to do that?

I fully understand that these questions may sound very stupid to you, and that I should do a better research instead of asking these questions, but I honestly don’t know where to find the answers, I mean I’ve looked around, but I just couldn’t stay like this for long so I posted on here. I’m so sorry if there is any other thread which already answers my questions (but I couldn’t find it). Thanks in advance for answering any of these questions, also if you can link me to some good tutorials which teach all the steps from scratch to a full usable model in games. Thank you so much.

#2

Bump
Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question? English is my 4th language so I don’t know if you guys understood my thread exactly… :confused:

#3

1- How does Texturing exactly work in Zbrush? I’ve looked around on the internet, but mostly people used the spotlight thing, whilst other people in other softwares like Maya, would edit the textures itself in Photoshop. (I also don’t completely understand what a UV is, I’m guessing it’s what you’re supposed to color in photoshop, yes?)

UVs are a set of coordinates that essentially say “if an image is applied as a texture, then put this specific part of the image onto this polygon”.

Zbrush can use UVs, but its primary painting tool uses vertex colors (every vertex gets a color applied to it, which gets blended across the neighbouring vertices). This requires more verts for painting finer details, but chances are if you have a highpoly sculpt then there are millions of verts anyway. The benefit to using vertex colors is that you can paint your sculpt without needing the final UVs, or even the final game model. The downside is that you dont exactly get to work with nondestructive layers and have access to the same kind of tools an image editing program like photoshop can grant.

Now that I’ve created something (Like a sword I quickly sculpted) what am I supposed to do next? Texture it first, then Zremesh it, or is it the other way around?

Either way should be good. You can paint it now if you plan on using polypaint. If you prefer to paint in something like photoshop, then it would be better to wait until you have the final model game model before you can uv it.

-I’ve read about Retopologizing (Which is Zremesh), and I understand that it lowers the quality of the sculpted model, so what I’m supposed to do is “Bake” the HighPoly into the low poly to make it retain the quality but still have low polygon count. How am I supposed to do that?

You can bake these maps in zbrush, in blender, in Maya, and in other free programs like xnormal. I imagine Maya would make a fine choice as it has to go through it anyway, and you’ll want your lowpoly mesh exported with its vertex normals and tangents in tact (something zbrush doesnt do).