Do you texture the skin with alpha brushes before or after retopologizing the character for games?

cturbo

hello, I am sculpting my first character in zbrush and would like to know if you are meant to retopologize the character first before adding the alpha skin wrinkle texures? Also after you have zwrapped do you subdivide the low poly character and project the high poly to the low?

iam717

After 100% making sure everything is where it should be an looks like it should, Yes retopo 1st is what i would do.

Now the why.?

If you did not and tried to fix things after the fact you would be doing extra work and might run into issues down the road with "re-projecting", the way i do things is i like my LOW to also be the low for my SUBD/Zbrush meshes it compacts everything into one package and do not have to save 100 files for one project.  The less is best for me especially when you have little space to work with, Hd/SD+.

In my case, Yes i project my 100% MANUALLY quaded re-topology mesh to the high, 100% for zbrush it hates tri's, you will find out if you haven't already.

Edit:

p.s. also look into zbrush erasing method using the morph brush and layers, so that when you do make the skin details if you choose to you can erase fix and or use the "noise" option in zbrush to "expedite", the process a little with again manually adding in what needs to be where or do it all manually and erase what needs erasing, the details are the VERY LAST thing you do before moving to texturing.

cturbo

Thanks for the advice, I will do the textures after. I'll check out the other methods for erasing. Great tip!

kanga

I dont use zBrush for any big uv job. Sculpt and paint the highpoly in zB using spotlight then straight to Blender for retopo and uvs of the lowpoly. Never done wrinkles but I reckon it would be faster and easier in zB.

iam717

Just adding a bit more cause why not:

Extra info about "z-uving" you can try to get it to listen and put the seam where you want it and extract it like that, i usually manually do it after, HOWEVER, i still use zbrush to UNWRAP the uv's of the object cause it flattens things better than anything else i tried.  Then i take those uv's and adjust them to the seam i want and stitch them back together in max.  I do this for each separated object for the project, after i sort them i use blender to "auto sort" a uv map, then back to max for me to finalize it.  Just quick for me wanted to share more of my processes since, who cares right.