- UVs
After you’ve done all the retopology on the character, it’s time to unfold the UVs. Good UVs are crucial when we start to paint the textures in the character, and if you did a good retopology before, you’re not going to have a hard time opening the UVs. For this particular character, I separated the UVs in UDIMs to have a higher texture resolution and by object, for some objects, I used the same UV island (the smallest metals for example).
- Detailing
Now that we have opened up and arranged the UVs properly, we’re going to start detailing the character back in ZBrush. Here I imported the clean mesh with the UVs and start the detailing process, generally at this point I always work non-destructively, to do so we’re going to create layers in ZBrush. I also used a standard alpha in ZBrush and start to give some more detail on the surface.
For the other parts such as the cloth and metals, it is not different, we’ll work non destructively with layers. For the shoulder armor detail, I use a very common method to make ornaments. Just import your geometry with UVs, subdivide a couple times until you get good resolution, and create a new layer. After that use the masking technique, similar to the one we used earlier on the cloth, then just draw your ornament, invert the mask, and after that you can use the INFLAT brush or the INFLATE option under the menu deformation to make the design stand out of the surface.
- Extracting the maps from ZBrush
Now that we’ve done all the finest details on our high poly model, it’s time to extract some maps from ZBrush to help us achieve those details into our low poly model.
in this particular project, I extracted only two maps from ZBrush, which was the displacement map and the normal map. We’re going to use the displacement later only for the body because I want to achieve a better quality of the details of the skin and the normal map was not enough for this task. Also, the displacement map is very heavy when we start to render our scene so we need to keep in mind that and use this map smartly.
To extract the maps I used the multi map exporter from ZBrush
- Creating the scene and light in 3ds Max
In this step, I exported the low poly model to 3ds Max and started to set up the scene with V-Ray lights and some different HDRIs, to see which one fits better what I’m looking for.