■ What Is Polypainting? 171Featured Artist: The Art of Magdalena Dadela
Canadian artist Magdalena
Dadela is a character artist at
Ubisoft Cinematics in Montreal.
She is known for her engaging and
realistic character models and tradi-
tionally styled digital sculpture and
anatomy studies.Polypainting cannot by itself be exported. To create a map for use in a third-party
renderer like mental ray, you need to bake the polypainting into a UV texture map. Luckily,
this is a simple process covered later in this chapter in the section called “Baking Polypaint
to UV Texture Space.” The resolution of the color map is again linked to the resolution lev-
els of the model. If you want the equivalent of a 4096×4096 map, you will need 16 million
polygons of subdivision.
As of ZBrush 3.5, you can apply polypaint inside HD geometry and export it as an
extremely high-resolution map. We will look at polypainting in HD later in this chapter.
If you plan on rendering your character in another application, you must eventually use
a UV texture map. This can be created from your polypainted texture or you could start with a
UV map. Figure 5.11 shows a character painted with PolyPaint but rendered in Maya.
Figure 5.11 These alien heads were designed and rendered by Alex Alvarez in mental ray.