Depends on the purpose. If you want to bake from highpoly, you probably want them as rings. If you use tiling textures and trim textures, maybe you need them as stripes, so the details follows the shape.
Yes. You can align and weld when everything is in place if necessary or use some trims and pillars where the pieces touch to hide intersecting/not perfectly aligned pieces which creates more visual interest anyway.
Heh.. I expected something else from the title... I'm digging it so far, but I'd say the metal trim texture could use a little bit more loving as compared to the wood. It's a tad too "blurry."
This is all I needed to make in zbrush for now. My helmet design is more suited for modo at this time. However, later I will add repousse and chasing details in zbrush, gold trim, bluing, and other organic details.
What are you trying to make? Hand painting normals using a tool like nDo is fine for environments, or anything that will uses tiles or trim sheets. For anything else beyond that, while technically possible, I would not recommend it.
I'd also advocate sculpting in ZB. You can't really go far wrong. A combo of trim dynamic and Orb flatten brush is absolutely perfect for this. Another option is Substance Designer if that were indeed an option for you.
Think it´s a great start but some of the tiled materials are lacking some nice roughness information. Also maybe add some dirt to the bottom of the wooden trims and maybe remove a few panels showing the wall behind?
Low poly WIP: First time using a cage to bake, and it seems to be off in some places. Also, need to correct the waviness on the trim areas. The color and spec textures are just to get an idea of where I'm headed.
hey guys all the floral work was hand modeled geometry which took ages! the only thing that was alpha was the tiny trim detail at the top which was a model then converted into an alpha the rest of the floral was hand modeled :P
Hey, the small ones were made with simply pushing the surface in manually (dam standard, orb crack, clay, smooth) Those on the shoulders were masked, inflated then sculpted over (trim dinamic, dam standard, smooth)