[Manuel Scherer]ZBrush 4 Sculpting for Games Beginner's Guide(pdf){Zzzzz}

This guidebook is built around four complex example projects with clear step-by-step instructions followed by useful explanation, advice, and handy reference material. It is richly illustrated with a friendly, informal writing style. If you want to get started fast using ZBrush for games then this is the book for you. This book is for all digital artists or game developers who want to create their own 3D sculptures in ZBrush. No experience with ZBrush is required – it's suitable for complete beginners and intermediate users.

Publisher: Packt Publishing (March 16, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1849690804
ISBN-13: 978-1849690805

About the Author

Manuel Scherer

Manuel Scherer is a German game developer who has worked in the games industry and in the fields of visual computing. He is currently teaching real-time visualizations at the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design.

Apart from his beloved work, he writes as a freelance journalist about the games industry from major events such as the Game Developers Conference Europe.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Solid Beginners Guide
By Amazon Customer on June 8, 2011
First of all: I only have the ebook-version of this book, so I can't say much about the quality of the printed version. The ebook-version however is in full color and of high quality.

The book is seperated into 16 chapters, including one about the basic 3D terminology for people completely new to 3D and a longer one about getting started with the zBrush interface for people coming from other 3D software or zBrush versions prior 4. The explanation of 3D-Terminology is short but enough for a complete beginner to follow the book. The book is aimed at game-artists but the infos and techniques presented troughout the book could also be applied to other areas as well. Each chapter starts with a short summary of what will be done during that chapter, key concepts are explained before being used. If a new or advanced technique is used while creating one of the models, there is a short and very useful "What just happened?" section that explains everything in detail. Another great feature of the book are the "Pop Quizzes" that are scattered throughout the book, these contain questions regarding the techniques you have learned during the chapters. So you can try and test yourself!

There are 4 main models that are being made in this book: A spooky tree, a sci-fi drone(featured on the cover), a creature(with fur and accesoires) and a harvester ship. So there are two hard-surface models and two organic ones created, which is really a good choice to cover nearly all of zBrush's features. All of these models are of a high quality. These 4 models are used to introduce zSpheres & zSketch, organic & hard-surface sculpting techniques, polypainting, extracting maps, preparing a model for a game and many more.

ironic - some diagrams need enhancement
By W Boudville HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on May 7, 2011
Scherer explains at some length how ZBrush version 4 lets you fairly rapidly build detailed artwork for computer games. As the book initially promises, the program suppresses much of the technical computing requirements that relate to putting together a mesh of vertices into something approximating a figure or object in your game.

Many functions are embedded within ZBrush that give you as the artist the means of easily and intuitively applying a special effect to compose. One nice example is the 'Bulge', which bloats a surface. In the text this is used to expand the dominant muscles of a leg. This is done within the larger context of using free form sculpting to craft an entire character. Far nicer than grubby and tedious mucking about with polygons and vertices.

Though you will probably need to explicitly deal with meshes in shaping the finer details of a character. Another concept available for use is the polygroup, which can handle mesh manipulation.

The book goes into quite a few other techniques. The overall package can be quite slick when you get used to most of these methods.

But a drawback of the book, and not of ZBrush, is some of the diagrams. Typically the ones I mean are screen captures of menus, where the background is dark. It becomes hard to see much of the details with this low contrast. The best figures are done against a white background. But the hard to see ones are sometimes done because the images were then edited to add white coloured rectangles or text that point to certain aspects. Graphically, it is not an easy problem, especially when the ultimate output is as hardcopy grayscale. Still, and ironically because this is after all a book on computer graphics, more effort should have been spent on improving the figures.