How to build a beast horn using Maya and detail it in Zbrush Part 2
Note: I am still new with Zbrush so I would love feedback on my workflow.
Working with Zbrush
Open Zbrush and under tools - import, bring your OBJ file. |
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Now you should see the horn in your tools as an icon. Pick and place it in the drawing canvas. |
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Now before you do anything else, immediately after you placed that OBJ in the canvas, For more accuracy, hold down the SHIFT button while placing the object on the canvas, so it will rotate on a 90 degree angle. |
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Now for some housecleaning. I placed my tools and transform menus on the left side of my canvas by clicking on the small circle on the top left of the pull down menu. |
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Under tools - Geometry, hit divide 5 times Every time you divide, the poly count will quadruple. In order to see your poly count, move the curser over the OBJ thumbnail in the tool palette. |
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Now for some sculpting. First we are going to target the areas that we would like to sculpt. To do so, we are going to mask some areas of the object. You can do this by holding the CTRL button while painting. |
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After a couple of strokes, you should get something like this. |
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Then under tools - deformation |
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Unmask all, and let's get to the fun stuff: "SCULPTING!" Hold the shift button while you brush on the horn. This will SMOOTH it out for you. Again, adjust the brush size and intensity to your liking, until you get something similar to this. |
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Use the brush for painting over the horn. To add more deformation to it, experiment with the Zadd, Zsubb, Move, and Smooth brushes |
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Time for some detaling. Drop your object. |
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After a few minutes of painting and sculpting, and using the above tools, you will get something like this. It is now time to export your work. |
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The next step is to prepare the model for Maya. When that model goes to Maya, it will be converted to Sub-D or poly smoothed. |
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Let's make our UV map. Under tools - textures - AUV tiles, it will make a UV map that has a perfect square for each poly face. |
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Export the cage OBJ by using Tools - Export. It will save it as OBJ file which has a UV map on it. We will need this in Maya. |
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Time for displacement and bump maps. Displacement: The map size by default, is 1024. I made it 2048 for a more accurate result. |
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It will be placed in the alpha tool palate. Highlight it and go to the alpha pull down menu. |
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Look at the alpha depth factor, mine was 0.9825. We will need that number later in Maya. While we are at it, hit the flip Vertical button. |
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Time for the Bump map. |
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Working with Photoshop Before we start with make sure your Photoshop setting is on 'No color management' under Save your new file and lets call it 'texture 1' |
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Image adjustment - Auto contrast Note: The image we got from Zbrush is gray color. Maya needs a range of black and white to make a proper displacement. I'm not going to get into the details of that , but in a nut shell Maya need a value of Black and White to make a proper Displacement and Zbrush gives a value of gray scale. |
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Back to Maya |