Workflow help

Chrismartinartist

Hi, I'm modelling the above crypt and have a few questions.

This is a stylised piece and I need to sculpt a high poly in Mudbox, and was hoping to paint it in there too. However for UV'ing purposes I cut the model down to 1/8th and used symmetry modifiers I don't want obvious repeats. It's making my head hurt trying to think what the best process would be.

It's currently modelled as one piece, but Mudbox is a lot easier to paint if everything is separate, should I just remake the base model for sculpting/painting? During my course I was always told floating/overlapping geometry was bad and to make everything a single piece but I see few others doing that.

Again I'm only using 3ds Max, Mudbox and Photoshop.

Chrismartinartist

Oh also, just to be clear I'm only talking about the main structure.

sprunghunt

How close are you going to be to this crypt? are you going to walk through those arches? 

If you're going to be able to walk up close to the pillars I would suggest making the whole thing in modules. So I would make a pillar, an arch, a smaller pillar, a skull, a cauldron etc. 

You could even use tiling textures for the walls and multiple UV channels to put dirt or mould on them. 

But if you're going to be seeing this from a distance then you could just unwrap everything in mudbox. I wouldn't worry about repeating textures in that case. It's easier to just avoid painting textures that are easy to spot repeats in. 

Chrismartinartist

I was planning to display it sort of like a turntable, I have a dungeon environment for it to sit in, and was going to either zoom out from the coffin (which would be inside) or do something with the slice plane modifier to show it inside.