ZBrushCentral

Game Character – “Chaos” the Biker

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Hello everyone! My name is Tim Rhoades and I am new to the ZBrush Central forums. I’ve been checking out the threads on here and have seen a lot of kick-ass artwork. So much so that it can be a little intimidating posting my own. None the less, here is a Next Gen game character that I’ve recently done that I thought I would share.

This project was basically an exercise for myself to incorporate a Max/ZBrush workflow for producing normal maps for Next Gen game characters.

I started out modeling the low poly in Max then exporting to ZBrush to sculpt, then exporting back to Max where I projected my normal maps and applied my texture maps, (that were painted in Photoshop). The biggest challenge I discovered with this workflow was getting my insanely high poly sculpts, (over 3 mil polys), from ZBrush back into Max for normal mapping. Exporting sections of my model from ZBrush as .obj files then importing them into Max with the help of Poly Cruncher and batch optimization proved an excellent solution for me.

Chaos_bikerTR.jpg

Feel free to ask any questions, and crits are very much welcomed! Thanks!

Attachments

Chaos_closeupTR.jpg

Chaos_mapsTR.jpg

Chaos_NormapMapTR.jpg

#2

7400 polys? or tris? If it’s polys I’d recommend reducing that count to 7400 tris.

#3

May I ask why you needed to export the high res mesh to 3dsmax? I could probably help you out with the workflow, as I have already figured it out.

#4

For your normal mapping another work around would be to export your lowest level out of Zbrush bring it into max and Unwrap the model. Once that is done you can reimport it into Zbrush and use Zmapper for exporting your normal map out. This would save you having to bring the high res into Max for baking out your normal maps.

#5

From what I can see it looks like you DID bring the low-poly back into Max and render with your normal maps(let us know if that’s incorrect). Plus, 7,500 polys is just fine for a next gen game. Also, you should model in quads, because you can always convert the whole model to tri’s later on, so I think you’re getting some nube advice elsewhere. I think you’ve got some nice edge flow and decent game model. Cheers!

sTEVe

#6

his armpits and pants look weird for the proportion

#7

Thanks for the comments guys!

Pieisgood: Yes, 7520 tris, (polys). I created this model with the Unreal 3 engine in mind as far as the poly count.

Norman3D: I sculpted the high res using ZBrush 3, which had no zmapper at the time. I did try the work around in the past of loading the NormalRGBMat etc, but wasn’t happy with the outcome. I was more interested here in following/practicing some of the workflow used by Kevin Lanning at Epic, (an awesome artist I might add). His seemed to work very well for me. I would be interested in checking out your workflow as well though. Thanks.

Malc2304: Yes, that route would work too. I’m assuming you are talking about making the base mesh in ZBrush to start with? I’ve messed around with zmapper a little bit in the past and just find normal mapping in Max works best for me. I could never get the normals from zmapper to look as good in Max as the model did in ZBrush. Any advice from anyone on this is appreciated!

Steveschultz: Thanks for the kind words man! To answer your question: I didn’t bring the low poly model back into Max from ZBrush. I used the base model that I originally created in Max. Yes, this was modeled using quads then converted to tris. It is also just a default scanline render. Nothing fancy.

CocoRebel: Thanks for your comment. It would be a little more helpful for me if you could elaborate on what you mean by “weird” proportions though. Thanks

#8

What I do, is generate the displacement map in Zbrush and turn it into a normal map with Xnormal. It’s a really cool application. I have had no problems so far.

Have a look to this tutorial.
Exporting High-Quality Nomal Maps in Zbrush