U2/UDK - Pillars first Pass

I have created my first past for the main pillar that will repeated throughout the model. Each side is unique so should be able to be rotated to give the feel of it being different pillars. It is by no means finished, I still have to complete the details in the textures, spec normal maps etc and i still have to add the detail on the top but it has proved my workflow so far.

I created a basic model with reasonably consistent divisions so that it could be subdivided in Mudbox and provided an even distribution of polys without getting ridiculous in size.

From this I sculpted the surface to give a worn stone feel. General roughing up and taking chunks out of the surface. I decided to avoid putting really fine detail in as i will add these later after i have textured it and can see what needs to come across. It also means i could keep the size of the high res mesh down to 748800 polys.

I created a new game model to transfer the high detail onto. I looked into Topogun but as I don't have a license for it so I did not pursue it. It looks pretty good for this job but I reverted to doing it in Maya.

I started with the base mesh (too many subdivisions for a game mesh) and removed all the excess geometry that was used to help the sculpt. I then overlayed it over the High res sculpt which i had imported form Mudbox.

I made the high res mesh live and then move the verts on the low res mesh to snap to the surface. I then looked at the areas that need individual geometry adding to help describe the form and cut in extra geometry. to make it fit better.

I sent both models out to xnormal and generated an Ambient occlusion map and a Normal map. For a first pass these seem to work ok. On top of that i have added a base texture but have added not detail yet. I just wanted to see how it might come together.

Mudbox performed beyond my expectation and i think i prefer it to ZBrush for this type of task. In the future I would do more tasks in Mudbox but i reverted back to tools I know better. Same goes for Topogun.

I am getting there though very slowly. Also this is way more detailed that what they actually did for these pillars in U2 so i guess i am not going to follow it that closely at all.