[UDK] Castle Siege Environment

RKotern

Hey guys
So it will be my first environment in UDK and also second ZBrush work.
I'm going to make Castle Siege Environment.

Some references

RKotern

Well, I've got some problems with siege equipment model. Currently I'm making a board in Zbrush and it doesn't look quite well. It looks more like stone in my opinion, but I don't know how to make it better.

My second problem is that when I exported normal map to 3ds max, it looks very bad on low poly model. All I can do is increase polys on that box but actually it takes to many polys after chamfer and there is plenty of board on this model. So as you can see I'm stuck.


Update
Yes I use Zbrush and I flipped normals, so it doesn't causing this problem. If I'll add chamfer (2 level) to every board normal map looks better, will be this ok? Then model would be about 1800 tris, 1016 polys. This is a bit to much, I guess.


At this stage it's my only solution to this problem. Any ideas?
Cheers

iniside

Depends on engine really.
Essentialy if you chamfer each edge, you can make them all use single smoothing group.
You must take note that in somes engines diffrent smoothing groups for each face can have exactly same or bigger performance impact, than adding additonal chamfers to allow using single smoothing groups for each face.

I say it for now. At this point you shouldn't worry about poly count. Just remember:
a) unwrap your model on the lowest polycount
b) add additional detail after you unwraped.

RKotern

Alright, I shrunk chamfer level from 2 to 1 and after adding one smoothing group to each board it looks same as it was with chamfer 2 level, 888 tris. Looks fine.
Now I've got only one question. How to gain a better effect making this board in ZBrush? Maybe some displacement maps or something?