ZBrush as first step in workflow

thinkinmonkey

Hi all,
after reading here and there this forum, I learned a normal workflow would be:

• rough shapes of assets for game tests
• creating hires versions
• sculpting (eventually)
• retopo (lowres)
• uv and painting
• game tests

But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Then I watched these videos:

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpost.php?p=740210&postcount=77
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showpost.php?p=742290&postcount=152

and I was asking me if ZBrush was a possible tool as first step for hires asset creation, both organic and inorganic assets.
I mean, could ZBrush be used instead of Max/Maya/XSI/whatever or companies/lead artists/supervisor wanted you to use the "classic" way?
Out of curiosity.
Thanks in advance for your opinion.

Justin Meisse

whatever gets the job done

I recently had to do an odd shaped boulder and I found it quicker to just take a sphere in zbrush, sculpt out a rought shape, retopo then finish in Max. The normals were half sculpted and half crazybump generated.

cryrid

I mean, could ZBrush be used instead of Max/Maya/XSI/whatever or companies/lead artists/supervisor wanted you to use the "classic" way?
Out of curiosity.

Oh yeah, easily. The new features they're adding usually help support this (zspheres/zsketch, shadowbox, etc).
Would still be wise to do the game-ready portion in a normal 3d app though.

Bibendum

cryrid wrote: »

Oh yeah, easily. The new features they're adding usually help support this (zspheres/zsketch, shadowbox, etc).
Would still be wise to do the game-ready portion in a normal 3d app though.

Not to derail this but just out of curiosity have you ever had issues with using ZSketch as a base creating "bubbles" of inverted geometry in the center of your model?

I've tried to use zsketched meshes as a base twice and both times I've ended up with wierd geometry in the center of my mesh that I couldn't delete. I initially ignored it but as I got further into my model it started crashing ZBrush...

The only way I was able to deal with it was to retopo and it doesn't seem very efficient to have to retopo my mesh twice just to avoid building a base mesh in max.

Using standard zspheres seems to work fine.

thinkinmonkey

Thanks a lot, guys.
To Bibendum, if you could post some images, we could try to help you.