This tutorial focuses on Environment Modeling for games or film production. If you have played Need for Speed Underground 2 or just about any game you may have wondered how they created the buildings or the walls or the bathroom stalls. This tutorial will show you a way to make these entirely in ZBrush and extract the maps that you can use in your 3D program or game engine of choice .
In the first part, we start with tileable images and convert them into ZTools that have both 3D and color information.
In the second part, we apply the newly created ZTools to a polygon plane in Projection Master. The functionality of this part is that we will be modeling and texturing simultaneously.
[attach=15246]frntPiece_2.jpg[/attach]
To begin this first part, we start with tileable images from Jeremy Engelman’s Brick’s and Block’s texture library from The Gnomon Workshop. Specifically, we will be using Rough_C_36 and Rough_B_36, Specialty_C_28 and Specialty_B_28, Feature_C_142 and Feature_B_142. (Click on the name to download the sample files generously donated by The Gnomon Workshop. )
CREATE THE ELEMENTS
First step,
- The first step is to convert all the files you will need to Photoshop files. Converting them to .PSD files is fairly painless if done as a Photoshop Action. The web is full of tutorials on how to do this.
- In ZBrush, select Tool: Plane3D.
- Tool: Make PolyMesh.
- Select Tool: 3DPM_Plane3D.
- Draw it on the canvas.
- Enter edit mode.
- Alpha: Import – Rough_B_36.psd.
- Alpha: Blur set to 3 (This will reduce the noisiness of the image).
- Texture: Import – Rough_C_36.psd.
- Tool: Geometry: Smt off.
- Tool: Geometry: Divide to resolution 6 (about a million polys).
- Tool: Displacement: Intensity set to .07.
- Tool: Display Properties: Dsmooth to 1.
- Turn Quick3D off.
- Tool: Displacement: Mode.
- Preview your displacement to see if the intensity is enough. It may be easier to see with a pure white texture.
- Tool: Displacement: Apply Displacement.
- Tool: Geometry: return it to subdivision level 1.
- Tool: Save As and save tool for later use. Make sure you save both the texture and the alpha.
Second Element: Brick “Specialty_C_28.psd”
- Repeat Steps 2 through 19 above for the next element. Please note that your polyMesh will now be called 3DPM_Plane3D_2 or some iteration along those lines.
- Open Feature_C_142.psd in Photoshop.
- Use the eye dropper to select the gray value to the sides of the feature.
- Press X to invert the background and foreground color.
- Image: Canvas Size and set the canvas to a square ratio. For this example, the width will be increased to be equal to the hieght.
- File: Save As and choose the .PSD file format.
- Repeat steps 21 through 25 for Feature_B_142.psd.
- Select color map of feature.
- Image: Duplicate this feature.
- Channel Window: Left Click on the alpha channel.
- CTRL + A to select the entire alpha channel.
- CTRL + C to copy everything in the channel.
- Layers Window: Background. Paste alpha channel (CNTL+V).
- Layer: Merge Down.
- File: Save As – this will be used later as a mask to protect the feature from further changes.
- In ZBrush, repeat steps 1 through 18 in the "First Element: Brick 'Rough_C_36'" section above.
We have finished part one of this tutorial. Part two (available in a few days) will show us how to use the power of the Pixol to paint our texture and model at the same time.