As much help as possible

[shadowmonkey]

Hi everyone

Im trying to up my skill sets for employment.It seems that more companies are demanding good working knowledge of Z-brush for next gen tittles.I have been in the games industry for 2 years, although my 3d experience is much longer.
Can anyone help?
What I need to learn is the pipe line from 3D Max(obj) to Z-brush and back.
Creation of charaters and how best to section for export into Z-brush.
Refine charaters to high rez in Z-brush.
Surface transfering of high rez bump,spec,diff and norm onto low rez mesh.
Texture and light bake
And of course rendering back in Max.
I would like to get my teeth into a charater modeling so I was wondering can any suggest a good solid tutorial that goes through all the stages in detail.

I was thinking of what they do with Unreal charaters and Gears of War.

Many thanks if you can help me as im going round in circles

[mr_ace]

check out all the gnomon workshop zbrush tutorial dvds, ov which there are a lot. for more in depth look into all its features and tools, the cg tutors ones are pretty good.

for unreal and gears stuff, the ballistic publishings d'artiste, character modeling 2 has a big feature on the unreal workflow, and talks you through exactly how they do it which is really good, but if your just starting, probably a bit advanced.

my advice would be to make a reasonable head base mesh, uv it, export it into zbrush and just worry about the sculpting, form and play with all the other tools too. once your happy with all that then you can try baking a normal map from zbrush, and then from there, u can go onto reimporting it into max and baking ur maps from there.

also, gather plenty of reference images of sculpts, wireframes, interesting characters etc

the main noob tip is to try not to subdivide too high too early, altho i can almost garuntee you will still do it lol, we all do. ppl get too carried away by making surface detail like scratches, they dont bother with the form and larger shapes. really try to master this. once you can sculpt well enough, its then easy enough to apply to other bits.

you can seperate your mesh into logical places, like head, shirt, hands. things that have signifigant transitions.

hope all that made some sense. someone better qualified will probably post you some advice soon too

[ReplicA]

That's some good advice, mr_ace gave you. You can also search for written tutorials on zbrsuhcentral, where there's more the one tutorial on how to go from max, to zb, and back. And let's not forget the incredibly in depth tutorial right here on GA by Marcus Dublin, http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=5000.

There's a huge amount of free, written tutorials on this subject, and I'm sure more than one video tutorial for free floating around somewhere.

Good luck with your search, and even more good luck with the job hunt.

[shadowmonkey]

mr_ace thanks yeh your advice makes sense to me :) I take it the ballistic tutorials are paid stuff? thanks for the heads up on topology I do love a clean mesh.I would love to get some gnomon stuff but sadly no money for now.
Replica thanks for the link I will check it out tomorrow and continue my hunt for free tutorials,Speaking of wich how come there are no links or tutorials on the tutorial tab? I was kinda dissapointed but then again all u do is ask I guess on the forums :)

Im running v3 is there much diff with 3.1?

Once again many thanks

My sitehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/darran_woods/sets/72157609456521343/