ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games: Beginner's Guide: Sculpt machines, environments, and creatures for your game development projects

This book is for aspiring (game-)artists who want to dig deeper into highly detailed game model production. It's good if you have a basic understanding of 3D and its possibilities and are also familiar with other 3D-software like Maya, 3D-Studio Max, Softimage, Blender, and others, which are good companions for ZBrush. Also, for someone looking for a more intuitive way of creating 3D models, this book and ZBrush are the right tools to start with.

In this book, we'll focus on learning how to use ZBrush for creating models for game production. We'll start with a quick look at the interface and then immediately start learning by solving little exercises. All these exercises will be based on fictional tasks to explain things in context. This means you'll not only be able to choose the appropriate solution for your task, but also consider the creative process as a whole. This is especially important if you do not only work on your own, but in a team of maybe a hundred or more people.

By the end of the book, you would have finished four complete game-specific modeling tasks, which will walk you through all the essentials of using ZBrush in a game production pipeline. Here's one of the four models we'll create:

Why do we use ZBrush and why is it so widely used in the game and film industry? Because it is very good for creating highly detailed models in a very short time. This may sound trivial, but it is very sought-after and if you have seen the amazing detail on some creatures in Avatar (film), The Lord of the Rings (film) or Gears of War (game), you'll know how much this adds to the experience. Without the possibilities of ZBrush, we weren't able to achieve such an incredible level of detail that looks almost real, like this detailed close-up of an arm:

But apart from creating hyper-realistic models in games or films, ZBrush also focuses on making model creation easier and more lifelike. For these reasons, it essentially tries to mimic working with real clay, which is easy to understand. So it's all about adding and removing digital clay, which is quite a fun and intuitive way of creating 3D-models.

Yet it is important to know that ZBrush is a very specialized tool, so it is mostly used in conjunction with other 3D Software to animate or export the models into a game engine, for example. Still, specialization comes along with efficiency and you will be amazed how easily we can realize our ideas with ZBrush in no time.

To better understand the workflow using ZBrush, let's think of a simplified way a 3D model is created to be used in our game. As always, there are many ways of doing the same thing, and many companies do it differently. By the end of this book, you will know some of the different ways of model creation, to blend into an existing workflow or to even create your own.

It all starts with an idea or ideally a concept drawing. This 2D concept is then roughly created in 3D, often in a 3D software such as Maya, 3D Max, Blender, Softimage, and others. Once this is done, ZBrush comes into play to detail the model and finish the digital sculpture, which is the fun part, but may also easily consume most of the time during model creation. After that, you may have something like a very detailed and lifelike sculpture of Caesar, but it has no color variation, it is just stone gray. So you paint it, usually in a 2D application like Photoshop or GIMP. This process of applying color to a model is called texturing. Depending on whether you would like to create a stiff statue or a walking Caesar, you may want to animate your creation, which is again done in a 3D software like Maya. With this step done, you're all set to export your model into any game engine you like, to make your own game or just view your model.

So in short, a simplified pipeline of creating a model using ZBrush, Maya, and Photoshop would look like this:

As shown in the previous image, there is more than one way of creating game models. We'll see in the later chapters that ZBrush could even be used for all of the first four steps, covering more than half of the workflow for game model production, as shown in the second diagram.

Here's another highly detailed example we're going to sculpt and view in real time:

First of all, make sure, you have at least ZBrush version 4.0 installed on your computer.

Another important point to mention are pen tablets. They usually consist of a tablet and a pen, imitating real drawing on your computer. You can still work in ZBrush just with your mouse, but it is highly recommended to use a pen tablet. They are affordable, depending on the working size you choose. Using ZBrush with a pen tablet not only saves you a lot of time, but is also more fun, because it feels very intuitive and natural.

If you ever tried to paint with a mouse, you know that it's a lot faster with a pencil.

This book assumes you're working with ZBrush on Windows. So if you're on a Mac, remember that the Control Key (Ctrl) we'll refer to is the Command Key (Cmd) on your keyboard instead.

There are six terms we will refer to most of the time in this book: Vertex, Edge, Polygon, Quad, Triangle, and Mesh. Let's see, how we can use them to describe a model of a hand, as shown in the following image:

Let's see what they mean in detail:

The most important thing about working in digital art seems to be very obvious but is often overlooked. It's a form of art and it should also be treated this way. This is something that you should have in mind when working on 3D game models or even concept art, because things such as color and composition will always be part of your work, even if not addressed explicitly.

This doesn't mean that you have to be the world's best painter to start in game art, but just think of your work as art, and also apply the rules of art to it.

Although job positions in game production include the term "artist", for example "concept artist" or "character artist", it is still a field that combines technical and artistic knowledge, and sometimes one outweighs the other.

ZBrush is a very good example of how creating digital art becomes less technical, so more and more people are able to give it a try. As this becomes easier and easier, the real distinction between digital artists will lie in their artistic capability, not their technical knowledge.

If you already have some experience in drawing or painting or even sculpting, it will be even easier for you to use ZBrush. I personally believe that if you can draw it, you can also sculpt it in ZBrush, because both mediums have so much in common.

Like every skill, creating art requires practice. We'll address decisions made out of artistic reasons in this book, so you can decide if you follow them, or alter the examples to your own imagination. Because at the end of the day, it all comes down to being able to give reasons for your decisions.

The concept is quite an important step in the creative process. Some people like to do it in writing to maybe share it with others, some just do it for themselves. Like the preceding paragraph stated, it's important to be able to explain your decisions. So at first, you need to know the purpose of your 3D-model. Sometimes, you may get such a concept from your Art Director, or you're given the freedom to create your own. To illustrate the latter case, let's imagine a character and do this process in short, so you can see how much this first concept can improve the process and the resulting piece of work.

This example will be written like a really short background story for the character, to give it some personality. Again, there are many ways of doing this and you are encouraged to find the ones that work best for you, because it depends on your personal style of working.

Let's imagine we want to create a robot for a game and are given all the freedom we want (which will probably only be the case in personal projects, but it's a good example of how things could work). So we write down short, let's say three, sentences to better define our character.

Now that you're digging into ZBrush, these websites are worth a visit:

http://www.pixologic.com. As the developers of ZBrush, this site features many customer stories, tutorials, and most interestingly the turntable gallery, where you can rotate freely around ZBrush models from others.

http://www.ZBrushcentral.com. The main forum with answers for all ZBrush-related questions and a nice "top-row-gallery".

http://www.ZBrush.info. This is a wiki, hosted by pixologic, containing the online documentation for ZBrush.

In this chapter, we've learned quite a lot about ZBrush, how to use it in production, discussed the most important terminology and finally talked about digital art in general and the importance of a concept.

So, now that we've covered all the preliminary steps, let's throw a glance at the interface of ZBrush and create our first model.