Zbrush new Zremesher!
So, when you just think how amazing and good Zbrush is with all its whistles and bells, they just get better!
I have been playing around with its new 4R6 feature: Zremesher, its the new Qremesher, but improved vastly.
I have been studying out-doors at rocks, and rocks can be quiet hard to make. So I have been doing these rocks here, and used them to experiment Zremesher.
I wanted to polish the platforms made by Estelle at the university project (brave bones), and use this opportunity to learn to do rocks.
I have been wanting to expose Basel bones for a while, and I will when I take the game assets in the project and I give it a new brush polish.
An early version of the rock sculpt.
After reviewing the earlier sculpt, a more rocky defined sculpt with emphasis on platforming design.
After the sculpt, I did some Zremeshing experiments. However, when doing remeshing several times, I found the final shape does change a little bit, so I did divide the mesh again, and did some projection so put the low div nearer to its high mesh.
Zremesher with 1368 triangles. Too many for an static platform?
The conversion from high poly to having a re meshed platform was fantastic, but after posting this on a FB page ( Lunchcrunch) a good fellow recommend it me to use decimation master, and how boy I was pleased with the results. I have only experimented with decimation master, but again, it made my job from great to even greater but making it 20% of its zremeshed topology.
A wooping diference, from 1368 to 264 triangles. If you ask me, they look pretty similar in shape.
If going back, I would maybe make the shape 512 or so triangles instead of 264, but, in a world where we have to constantly look for ways to making assets cheaper to run. It makes more sense to have more assets to cover the triangulation with smaller assets (put some rocks or grass on top) to hide the triangulated mesh. That has a small cull, so it fades away after the camera being 20 metres or so away from the camera.
Asset Textured
Textured and placed in Unity with Difusion, Normals and Specularity. All done using dDo. An Amazing Photoshop plugging used for High to Low Poly texturing.
With all these self discovering techniques, I have also been learning UV Layout, a program that makes UVS prety good and pretty fast! With dDo, UVLayout and now Zremesher, I am willing to focus more time on the sculpt and the shape of the object. And to make assets faster!
A list too big?
With the massive amount of platforms I want to make, does it seem illogical to do it this way? Yes at first. I was thinking: wow, I got to retopologize, do the uvs and texture by hand? for each of the assets? If I have learned the bad way in the last few weeks, its the following. An asset when made, most people will look at it for just 0.3 to 3 seconds. At times just 5 or 10 seconds if they are artists them selves. Is it worth spending more than 3-4 hours for a single asset? depends on the importance in the game or environment, and depends of its purpose. Now with dDo I can save a preset, and I press a button, textures done. With Zremesher and decimation master, press a button, Done. And with Uv Layout, its like a puzzle origami game. Pick edges, drop, and expand. I can focus on the art looking like art. And I can focus on giving the assets its actual purpose!
For some more reading, check out what I mean by reading this Naughty Dog article
