Week 05:

ZBRUSH DONE!!

As I setout to do this week I have finalized the ZBrush Trim elements of my scene. The process behind making these involved using ZBrush's "CurveTube" brushes to create the decorative sweeping shapes combined with sculpting individual leaves and using "Bend Curve" modifiers much like what I created for the spiral acorn element. (That leaf actually made an appearance in many of these sections so was certainly worth making early on).

Newel Post Mid Section: I feel this was more successful than the panels but was VERY time consuming with lots of awkward elements coming together.

Overall I feel this was a mostly successful process. Whilst it certainly was time consuming it has created a nice effect that will get a good amount of mileage in this piece. Going forward I would love to include these elements in more of my Trim sheets as with some of these I hadn't initially accounted for them so has ended up being a separate smaller (512) texture set. I may combined these in later on but given my time left I'd rather spend that on other elements.

I also feel they do look a bit too much like "Pasted on" opposed to actually carved elements in Designer this would be quite an easy fix, altering the height of elements that aren't actually overlapping each other, but when working in ZBrush I couldn't quite get the result I wanted by pushing and pulling the back plane around and was opposed to Dynameshing everything to create the desired carved appearance for fear of my laptop exploding.

One element I do feel looked particularly nice was my Corbel. Using my first leaf and decimating to a low poly level, followed by deleting all the backfaces created not only a visually alike piece to the reference but is relatively poly efficient too given the complexity. (3K Tris) whilst too much for an actual game (given the size and usage of the asset) for this scene works just fine.

Moving forward I now need to create a Tiling texture in Designer for the painted walls.