Texturing

The Carnotaurus was colored and unwrapped in ZBrush. I just love how easy it has become to unwrap a model. Using polygroups and ZBrush's UVMaster you can get decent unwrap in a matter of minutes. If you spend a bit more time you can get really nice results. Creating UV islands with polygroups, which in addition can be easily created by masking or polypainting, is a breeze. It's funny that I should say this because I hated UVW mapping – I despised it. At a couple of points when I was a beginner I thought I would probably never learn UVW because it seemed so difficult to me back when I was just starting out. The original Carnotaurus from the original Brothers In Blood image were not unwrapped. I used a projection mapping method.

Since the process of unwrapping in ZBrush has been covered inside out by numerous tutorials, I'll just fly over the basic steps. Once you have your model, split it into polygroups at the lowest subdivision setting (Fig.18).


Then step into the ZPlugin/UVMaster and click the Work on Clone button in the UVMaster palette (Fig.19). Now you are ready to start protecting areas of the mesh that you want to keep clean of seams by clicking Enable Control Painting and the Protect button.


Once you do that, you can additionally make sure the seams appear at specific points by painting lines where you want your seams to appear. You can do that by clicking the Attract button under the Enable Control Painting section of UVMaster. With my dinosaurs' heads I also used density settings to make the UVW islands a bit bigger so the details there ended up cleaner and at a larger resolution.

After everything is prepped, ZBrush magic kicks in. Click the Polygroups button to On if you haven't done that before and then click Unwrap. Once ZBrush computes UVW for you, flatten to see the result (Fig.20).



Note: You might need to do some repositioning of UVW islands to get better results while creating Normal maps, and to minimize the Normal map seams. This is something that plagues otherwise great models. These seams appear on parts of the model where your UVW map islands meet each other. A good application to use to reduce or completely remove Normal map seams is XNormal.

An even better thing is to practice and try to create as few UVW islands as possible. Try and find places for seams that are less visible, and in places where they might be hidden by the specific anatomy of the character you are creating. This is an area I'm still improving upon myself. In Fig.21 you can see how my Carnotaurus model had its seams distributed.