EPTIndustry standard, incredibly unique and powerful, and also profoundly irritating and often a huge pain in the arsehole.
Zbrush is a 2.5D program, I don't fully remember what exactly that entails, but I'll take a swing at it; Zbrush is a program that utilizes 3D but renders it as a 2D image? Yeah, I don't get it either. Just think of it was a modelling program, because thats what it is.
The 2.5D thing is only really interesting or relevant because whats nice about Zbrush is that you're modelling in EXTREMELY high polycounts, I'm talking like, 5m+ polygons. For reference, a rough average for a good main character game model is 30Kish polygons, Blizzard regularly operates much lower, in WoW the characters utilize around 7,000 polygons. So Zbrush is obviously WAY up there. The way Zbrush handles this immense task of rendering all these polygons is that it flattens it in some way or another. Neat stuff, I'm sure.
Now, Zbrush is used for detailed modelling, you use it relatively organically, whereas in something like Maya or 3DS Max you're slicing and moving vertices and edges and faces around, in Zbrush you're doing something more akin to a fusion between drawing and sculpting in clay.
Zbrush's huge poly meshes are a popular way to start any model, you get to sculpt it in high detail and then retopologize it in Maya or 3DS max so it's no longer an unfathomably huge polycount and then you get to bake the Zbrush sculpture into the lower polycount model giving it the illusion of all of that fancy detail sculpted in on Zbrush.
So for reference heres something I've been working on to get the hang of this god forsaken program since I know very little about using it (I've spent more time using Maya.)
Its not done yet, but to get an idea of how things in Zbrush look at a beginning ish stage of development.
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/tDNUZti.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/9odhzj0.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/vdtLeWf.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/fUYxzKt.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/TRWfNPd.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/v2EBRWx.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Vc9lyKb.png)
This stage is called Organic sculpting, because the forms are organic, I only really use a few tools to do this so as not to get bogged down in the scarier areas of Zbrush that seem to cause frightening and unknown things to happen.
Clay BuildUp tool, Move tool, Smooth tool
Those three will do ya all ye need to do for the organic sculpting part, they'll be a good start if you're just getting started.
The next stage after the Organic sculpting is the Hard Surface modelling, which is stuff like metal, armor, clothes, etc. I haven't gotten here yet so I'm not sure what tools I'll be using, but I'm sure it'll be a lot o' fun.
Some people will sculpt the clothing right into the model from the get go, but for games productions you really shouldn't, you're probably gonna want your model to change clothes, and articulate and static clothing modelling directly onto the body can screw with your deformation and offer you far more minimal options for character customization.
Yep. Zbrush.
I'll do another blog when I get to doing Hard Surface modelling, and another after that when I retopologize this model, and maybe another after that if/when I get to rig and animate it!
Tada, this is your small glimpse into a part of developing for games, at least the art part. Hurrah!
