Gnomon School of Visual Effects

Take Your Texturing to a Higher Level

Digital Sculpting and Texturing in ZBrush builds on the skills acquired in Intro to ZBrush. Students will follow a full ZBrush pipeline taking a character from initial sculpture through to texture mapping and finally rendering in Mental Ray for Maya. Sculptural topics covered include creating effective anatomical form as well as designing in 3D. High frequency details are applied by freehand sculpting in Projection Master as well as the use of custom alphas. Special attention is paid to the design of these details and methods to create believable wrinkle patterns on flesh. Also covered are several techniques for creating color textures as well as a workflow for hand painting a skin texture within ZBrush. We cover the ZBrush extensions Zapplink, Image Plane, Displacement Exporter, as well as Zmapper in depth.

The pipeline is completed by examining how to extract color, diffuse, normal, and displacement maps from ZBrush and assemble them into a Mental Ray render. The 16 bit as well as the more advanced 32 bit displacement workflows are covered in detail. Lectures are based in production oriented methods and students will complete the course with a solid understanding of how to implement ZBrush in a pipeline where a character can be taken from concept sculpture to final rendered asset.

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