Sculpting in ZBrush for Games

Learn how to sculpt environment assets in ZBrush for games. In this particular video, taken from "Next-Gen Game Development with Unity3D Volume II: Softimage and ZBrush Production Pipeline", we sculpt a hi-res environment asset that will later be used to bake normal maps and anything else we need in order to make our game look good. We'll be using the Unity game engine, but the workflow works for any game engine on the market, including Unreal Engine or CryEngine.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Unity
• Unity3D
• 3D
• ZBrush
• gamedevelopment
• gamedesign
• modeling
• animation
• i3D
• i3DTutorials
• tutorial
• tutorials
• howto
• environment
• software
• educational
• video game

[Recrohin]

It was one of the guys who works for interstellar Marines. It was a 3 weeks course where he introduced unity for our class. He also mentioned about the drawcalls and that we should reuse everything if we could, because it was one of the simplest ways of optimizing.

[i3dtutorials]

@Recrohin Also forgot to mention that there are scripts that you can use to merge meshes at runtime; thus optimizing even more. Also, if you're using Unity Pro, you can take advantage of Umbra Occlusion Culling middleware to optimize even more. Then there's other little things to help, like making sure to use only one skinned mesh renderer per game character, using vertex lit shaders whereever you dont need pixel lit shaders, etc. With all this, you can have scenes with tons of triangles.

[Recrohin]

I see. I've only worked in unity, and our teacher told us to keep polys as low as possible to make sure nothing was causing lag. But I might give it a try and see how much it affects the game to have some more complex models in the scene :)

[i3dtutorials]

@Recrohin Who's your teacher? That's not the best advice. In Unity specifically, but this works in most engines, polys isnt the biggest resource hog, in fact, its on the lower part of the list of optimization techniques. Draw calls have the biggest impact in Unity. To reduce draw calls, you should reuse materials whenever you can, also, you should merge meshes whenever you can; the less distinct meshes there are, the less draw calls- and this will save performance 100x more than lowering polys.

[Recrohin]

Nice video, what did your ingame model end at, regarding polys ? cause it really looks like a heavy model.

[i3dtutorials]

@Recrohin It's not heavy at all. You'd be surprised at how many triangles can be rendered at once in most modern real time engines; engines like Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, Tech5, etc. can handle millions of triangles easily.

[ShayTheMon]

@i3dtutorials really? I figured they could make models look like they have millions but i didnt know they literally could handle MILLIONS easy.

[xFoKe]

nice thx for uploading this