Texture Painting
In this chapter we’ll look at various ways of creating
color maps in ZBrush. You accomplish this with a combination of hand-
painting textures and by projecting texture elements from photography
onto the mesh or a UV texture map. When painting textures in ZBrush, the
best approach is to use PolyPaint and then bake your color into UV space.
Baking means converting the polypaint data to a 2D texture map that can be
read and rendered in programs outside ZBrush. This approach allows you to
take advantage of ZBrush’s fully interactive polypainting tools as well as HD
geometry levels for maximum texture resolution. UV Space is a method in
which the computer unwraps a 3D object into a 2D plane so that a texture
can be applied without distorting. PolyPaint is a Pixologic technology that
requires no UV coordinates to function. This can be a huge timesaver as
it allows you to sculpt, paint, and complete a character in ZBrush without
stopping to set up the UV coordinates. We will begin by looking at UVs and
how they work in ZBrush.
UVs in ZBrush
UVs are the coordinates that allow the computer to unwrap a 3D object into a 2D plane for
texture application. A good analogy is to think of unstitching a soccer ball and laying it out
flat (Figure 5.1); this is a spherical object that has been unfolded into a flat plane. In Figure 5.2
you can see a 3D model of a head and the accompanying UV Texture coordinates. There are
several methods of generating UVs using ZBrush’s built-in automatic mapping tools, or you
can lay out UVs by hand in third-party applications such as Maya or Headus UV.