Creating Game Weapons in Maya and ZBrush
In this tutorial we will use a Maya to ZBrush workflow to build and texture a detailed battle hammer. Software required: ZBrush 3.1 and up.
What you'll learn
In this tutorial we will use a Maya to ZBrush workflow to build and texture a detailed battle hammer. When working with digital assets, the ability of your computer to manipulate those assets is limited, especially when dealing with very high resolution meshes. For this reason, we use things like normal maps to simulate the high resolution detail in a way that we can more easily use. In this course, we'll use a weathered battle hammer as an example to illustrate some of the ways you can use Maya and ZBrush together to build and sculpt high resolution props and set pieces and create usable assets. After building the base geometry and laying out UVs in Maya, we'll go through the process of sculpting and texturing the hammer in ZBrush. We'll finish up by applying all of that detail back in Maya to create a high quality, usable prop. Software required: ZBrush 3.1 and up.
Table of contents
- Building the Base Mesh 10m
- Creating a UV Layout 7m
- Transferring Geometry to ZBrush 3m
- Sculpting the Hammer Head 9m
- Painting the Hammer Head 11m
- Deforming the Handle Geometry with Textures 3m
- Converting Textures to Polygon Colors 6m
- Outputting Normal Maps from ZBrush 3m
- Moving Assets from ZBrush to Maya 3m
- Transferring Color and Normal Maps in Maya 6m
- Creating Custom Specular Maps 8m
About the author
Justin thrives as a lead modeling author at Pluralsight. Growing up, Justin found a deep interest for the computer graphics industry after watching movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, and The Abyss. His ambition would lead him to work at Sony Imageworks in Los Angeles on movies like Monster House and Surf's Up. Justin has also had numerous articles, tutorials, and images published in 3D World and 3D Artist. As an author, Justin enjoys collaborating with fellow authors, especially on project... more