3D Creative December 2015

3DCREATIVE MAGAZINE | Designing a fantasy character
The custom brushes used for
The finished skin details
The model’s UVs in Maya
Sculpting skin details: For skin pores,
08 wrinkles and cross-hatching detail, I use
the Dam Standard and Pen A brushes with ZSub
on, and the Standard brush with Color Spray
settings using various alphas. With the help of
the brushes pictured, and some custom alphas, I
create all the skin details.
Exporting UVs into Maya: For the UVs,
09 I have the help of ZBrush’s UV Master
plug-in. Under the UV Master settings, I turn on
the polygroups which I created before. This gives
me a decent UV. I export the low resolution mesh
into Maya, making sure to deselect ‘Grp’ under
the Export menu, as I did previously in step 4. If
you don’t do this, the model will be exported in
chunks. In Maya, I arrange it into four UDIMs (UV
tiles) with some UV changes.
After this, I export the model back into ZBrush. As
there are no changes made to the mesh, keeping
the tool open in ZBrush at its lowest subdivision
and simply importing the UV modified mesh into
ZBrush will do just fine.
Sculpting the armor: There are a few
10 awesome techniques for creating hardsurface
accessories, which wouldn’t be possible
or efficient without ZBrush. I’ll try to explain a few
of them. To start with, we need a base, which can
be extracted from the body as follows.
First we need to duplicate the SubTool and mask
the area to extract the mesh from. Use Ctrl+W
to assign a polygroup. Now we need to smooth
the jagged line of the polygroup border. For
this I use the Smooth Groups brush from the
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