Zbrush to Unity

I recently purchased Zbrush 4r4, and am really enjoying learning about its sculpting and painting abilities.
However...I'm having a hard time figuring out how get a low poly version of my high poly sculpts, with textures and normal maps, into Unity. Using only ZBrush.

I've purchased several books and watched videos till my head is spinning. I've gotten better at sculpting and painting. I can create a low poly version via retopo, and create a uvmap and texture from the high poly version. But at this point it breaks down, I can't seem to get the high poly texture and normals to apply to my retopo'd mesh.
I understand the -concepts-...create a low poly version via retopo (I prefer to retopo manually), save out the polypainting as textures and do the same with the normal map, and apply those to the low poly mesh.

But everyone at that point saves out the retopo'd mesh, and uses a different app to get the details on. Topogun or normalizer or whatever its name is.

Zbrush seems to have all of the tools. It can create the uvs via UVMaster. It can retopo. It can create textures and normal maps. I'm just ready to see some of my work in Unity and I can't see how to go through the complete process. Ideally...a simple video of something like a colored cube, with a few colored scratches or something, ending up in Unity would be ideal.

 

Zbrush is not a rendering engine, tho it has some excellent rendering tools, it will not bake your high poly mesh into your low poly mesh for you, you can use a free program to do that, for example xnormal. You can do most of it in zbrush yes, but it doesn't do everything, and its not really aiming to - its designed to be an excellent sculpting tool - the supplemental tech like qremesher for example is excellent for some types of assets but manually doing topo (either with the topo brush or topo tools, or exporting to a program like topogun 100$ btw) is how you get an optimized mesh built that you can then back your textures into it. At that point once you have your low poly mesh, unwrapped, baked into, you can import it into unity through the normal unity asset pipeline.

 

Ok, thanks. I was hoping that since ZBrush can create the textures and uvs and all, it could go ahead and bake them onto a low poly mesh.

I guess I'm confused. I've seen other people state that it is possible to do the complete workflow in ZBrush. I don't mind purchasing topogun or xNormal. But I'd rather not if I don't have to. I did some more searching, and in this post:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/101177-The-Usefulness-of-Topogun-(Retopology-Work)

brokenpoly seems to suggest that if you have zbrush, you don't need topogun. Any light shed on this would help clear things up.

 

Firstly, xnormal is free.

Secondly, you don't need to purchase topogun, but it is a more complete topology solution, it will also bake your meshes if you want

Also, I don't see where anyone suggest that zbrush is a 100% solution. It does about 99% of the job. Its simply not designed to replace 100% of your pipeline, even if it is an amazing tool.

 

Yeah, free is hard to pass up, I just wanted to know if Zbrush could do it all..even if it isn't as efficient in some areas
Thanks, I'll see what results I can get with xnormal, and try out topogun also.

 

Here is an advice :
use blender for more precise UV Map
and xNormal to create normal and ao maps
and marmoset to render them

 

http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/military-character-assets-with-joseph-drust/#building-game-resolution-mesh-part-3

building-game-resolution-mesh:

This new tutorial on zbrush central might help you. He made all within zbrush. includes high to low poly, diffuse map, normal map, specular and AO.

 

Just wanted to update this thread and say that ZBrush can do everything needed to bake out a low poly diffuse and normal mapped model....

The new ZRemesher is also pretty good single click retopo.

As far as exporting, just use multi-map plugin and export the mesh as obj, and the normal and diffuse maps - then drag into unity.

Baking from the high poly subd level down is basically automatic. Just create a normal map with level 0 selected.

Might want to combine the AO and diffuse in image program like photoshop.
And there TopoGun is great for controlled retopo.

But ZBrush is all you need to export to unity....

 

Of course zbrush can generate normals from your high poly.