Painting the Forest Spirit - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 550

When the model is decimated you will be able to zoom in and examine the details. Turn on Polyframe
mode with Shift + F to see the level of decimation ( Figure 9-7 ).
6. Now that the mesh is decimated you can export the OBJ file. Under the Tool menu, click the export
button and save the mesh as body.obj. We will need to repeat the process for the horns.
7. Select the horn SubTool and be sure you are at the highest subdivision level. Open the ZPlugin ⇒
Decimation Master menu. We don't need to preprocess the horns at this stage because we clicked Pre-
process All before, which wrote a cache file for each SubTool. Set the k Polys slider to 200. This will
decimate the horns to 200,000 faces.
8. Export the horns as horns.obj. You will also want to manually export the eyes and teeth respectively.
These are not detailed ZTools so the objs can be exported without decimation.
Figure 9-6: The k Polys slider sets the target polygon count of the final mesh in thousands of polygons.
Figure 9-7: Here you can see a decimated mesh in gray shade as well as frame mode. In frame mode, the
selective triangulation performed by Decimation Master is apparent.
Now that the decimated meshes are exported to disk as OBJ files, we are ready to move to Maya. In the
next steps, we will import these models, create a lit environment, and render passes for compositing in Pho-
toshop.
Loading the Models to Maya
At this stage, we are ready to load our decimated meshes into Maya. This will allow us to render passes of
the character, taking advantage of Maya's light and camera settings as well as the indirect lighting options
available in Mental Ray for Maya. We will use Maya's render layers to help organize the scene and create
the required render passes for compositing. Follow the steps to prepare a Maya scene.
1. With Maya open, go to File ⇒ Import and from the File type drop-down select OBJ ( Figure 9-8 ).
At the bottom of this window, in the File Type Specific Options section, make sure the radial button next
to Single Object is selected.
Figure 9-8: The Import Options menu