Zbrush visualization error
polycounter lvl 8
Hi, people. I need help to solve a visualization problem in Zbrush.
I have this wooden door:
The sculpting is finished, but as you can see, the vertical lines of the wood on the right side of the frame, look horrible. However, if I rotate the object clockwise, this happens:
As you can see now, the lines of the wood that previously were vertical, now look perfect since they are horizontal. And if I rotate the object to a side, this happens:
As you can see now, everything looks perfect. So, the problem is when I see the vertical lines of the frame from front. This doesn't happen with the vertical lines of the wooden planks (maybe because they are bigger).
Is there some solution to this?
I have this wooden door:
The sculpting is finished, but as you can see, the vertical lines of the wood on the right side of the frame, look horrible. However, if I rotate the object clockwise, this happens:
As you can see now, the lines of the wood that previously were vertical, now look perfect since they are horizontal. And if I rotate the object to a side, this happens:
As you can see now, everything looks perfect. So, the problem is when I see the vertical lines of the frame from front. This doesn't happen with the vertical lines of the wooden planks (maybe because they are bigger).
Is there some solution to this?
Replies
I'd send it to where you are making your final render and see if it really is a problem at all. If this is something that will be baked to a normal map go ahead and do that. Details this small aren't something that will show once you are working at common environment art texture resolutions.
Hopefully you are working with layers so that making non-destructive tweaks to tiny details like this is fast and easy.
It's important to take your time and do a good job but going through the whole process a few times even continuing forward if you aren't 100% happy is good for a beginner because then you learn where to focus effort and where effort is wasted. If you are working on a team it is a big danger to everyone if you are spending hours focused in areas that don't produce results that will make a difference in the final product.
Design your workflow so that all parts are as non-destructive and easy to edit later as much as possible. To that end I'd question doing this sort of detail work in zbrush versus through textures in the first place. Especially something as generic as wood - we have libraries upon libraries of free, photorealistic content available - I doubt anybody has a need to sculpt wood grain in 2021 unless its for a very stylized effect?
The guy who made that pretty looking indie game about being a painter... i cant remember the name - anyway he had a development blog with some tips for environment art. He talked a bit about how when he worked at some studios it was very typical for younger environment artist to be spending hours and days working on a texture for a single leaf that ends up most the time as a few pixels on screen, and thousands of these per tree. So that is wasted effort and it has a real cost. Makes making games more expensive, exposes everyone to more risk then, and we can probably blame the leaders but if you police yourself the speed at which you produce results will set you apart from those stuck on endless noodling.
It is rare to get art right on the first go, so what is important is having the ability to make edits and redo's to work many times over the course of a project.
This model is a piece of a building that should look nicely on a First Person cam with HD textures.
I'm not working for a team now, but I'll do it later, so... yeah, I'm one of those persons who waste much time on a bad workflow and details. I want to improve that, but there aren't many tutorials on internet focused on realistic environments workflow. Anyway, the wood isn't manually sculpted. I have used a brush with a wood texture alpha and DragRect stroke style.
Anyway, I would appreciate a lot if you can you tell me some tips about how would you texture an object like this (aroudn 2 meters long) for a First Person game with HD textures, like using a texel density of 1024 px per meter. Maybe I can do the planks and borders on a high poly model and do the normal map of that on substance painter; and then make the wood texture maps on Substance Designer. The problem is, I'm not sure how/where should I apply the Substance Designer wood textures to the door and how/where should I combine them with the baked normal map. That's why I'm doing all in the high poly model directly.
Some tips or tutorials about the best workflow to do this?
You can change the material in zbrush to get different feedback. There is two types of materials in zbrush, those that have precomputed lighting and those that get lighting from lights in the scene.
Again, I wouldn't worry about all that zbrush weirdness - evaluate the thing in your render engine. A lot of beginners have an idea that the process of making a 3d model is a rigid following of steps. It's not. You can send the thing right now to unreal or unity or toolbag or where ever it is gonna go and start getting a feel for what the actual finished model will look like. That's important way to not get surprises later.
When you are learning its good to reduce the total amount of variables you are dealing with, otherwise you end up confused as hell at some point. So like, just grab some quixel megascan textures or something like that to work as placeholders for the texturing, then you can focus only on setting up your UV's. Once you figure out what resolutions you need and how you should lay them out for easy texturing, then you can focus on the task of making your own custom textures.
Thanks for the tips. Going back to the main topic, you were right. The problem was kind of solved changing the light position.