Let's talk reliefs and ornaments

Zpanzer

Hello everyone.

I'm having some trouble figuring out a good and efficient workflow surrounding making high detailed models that features reliefs and ornaments, just like a ionic or composite capital on a column, mostly seen on old roman architecture like these:



I did a little test on modeling it in 3ds max and this is my result:

However, the problem I get is that most of my details look detached to the rest of the pillar, and doesn't look really authentic. This is of course a result of me actually modeling the details etc. separate from the main pillar and when they don't share the same mesh and topology, they won't look connected.

I would love to see how people in the industry handles these kind challenges. I know Zbrush seems like a logical step, however I'm not technically a game artist and I have to make sure the high poly mesh is able to run inside of 3ds max with the rest of my environment. Is displacement maps the answer? Or decimation master?

Noors

That seems pretty much natural to me.
I don't think that zbrush is necesseraly better than subd for that kind of object.
You might want to try mental ray round corners parameter.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=71995
But honestly you're beeing a bit perfectionist here

Gestalt

I did a Corinthian capital entirely in ZBrush once, and I do not recommend it. If you want things to remain clean, precise, and manageable you are best off modeling your individual pieces and duplicating them around as floating geometry. It's a lot easier to manage things that way and you can get crisper results.

You could also approach it from a texturing standpoint, make the design for each of the moldings (just do it flat) and make a bump for that molding to use(and reuse) as a tileable texture. Since they're tiling horizontally you would stack each molding design on your texture vertically (you could even have the tiling be done by mirroring since the details all seem symetrical). This would be good is you wanted a an atlas of designs to reuse and to minimize texture size while maintaining a high resolution of detail.

Once you bake everything down from the high-poly into a map I think it will look much more unified and connected no matter what you chose to do.

Zpanzer

Gestalt wrote: »

I did a Corinthian capital entirely in ZBrush once, and I do not recommend it. If you want things to remain clean, precise, and manageable you are best off modeling your individual pieces and duplicating them around as floating geometry. It's a lot easier to manage things that way and you can get crisper results.

You could also approach it from a texturing standpoint, make the design for each of the moldings (just do it flat) and make a bump for that molding to use(and reuse) as a tileable texture. Since they're tiling horizontally you would stack each molding design on your texture vertically (you could even have the tiling be done by mirroring since the details all seem symetrical). This would be good is you wanted a an atlas of designs to reuse and to minimize texture size while maintaining a high resolution of detail.

Once you bake everything down from the high-poly into a map I think it will look much more unified and connected no matter what you chose to do.

I did some zbrush doodles once and also found the edges extremely hard to control, however the next day I saw some images of other artists doing it purely in Zbrush and their result outshined my max modelling because everything seemed to be more connected. Your texturing workflow seems interresting, and I guess with some clever use of AO on both textures and model, I guess you could actually end up hiding the edges that makes everything seem like the details are just slapped on.

@Noors, I haven't thought about the rounded corner feature in Mental ray, however my competences are mainly withing V-Ray because of my arch-viz background. Thanks for the input though, could be I could fake something like it with the use of AO and beveled edges where things intersect.