PolyPainting

In keeping with the theme of the last few blog posts I will be posting the progress I am making on my character bust. I am happy with the look of the piece for what the project was designed to be, I now have a good idea for the full character and over the next couple of weeks will start working on that. Anyway I am digressing from the point of this post, seeing as I am happy with the sculpt (at least all the major forms of it anyway) I decided it was time to start texturing. I have been texturing in a different way to the way I normally do, instead of unwrapping the uvs of the character and opening them up in photoshop I have simply used polypaint to painting straight onto the polygons of the character. This is good for several reasons; first of all a 2k texture has roughly 4 million pixels in the document, although quite a lot is taken up by black space. My model when subdivided has something like 27 million polygons all of which can store colour information, second because I am painting in 3D I dont need to worry about texture seems, and can the model as it appears in 3D, I can go back into sculpting mode whenever I won't if I want to add or subtract surface detail. Finally I I am not missing out on any of photoshops fantastic features as I can just position the model and open it as a projection in photoshop, make changes and drop them back onto the zbrush canvas. Another advantage is not having to uv map the character before paiting. Instead I will paint on the polygons then when I have finished my low res block and uv mapped that, I will bake the normal, ambient occlusion and the colour information from the hi res down onto the uv's of the low res. So all in conclusion all characters with normal maps will be painted in zbrush, as it is so quick and easy to do. I've only really been working on the skin (an area I need to improve on) this morning, everything else has just been given block colours as place holder detail and will be dealt with next.