Thing is though, for stuff like concrete slabs where the detail is mostly high frequency and pretty small, you can't really justify the time to sculpt this stuff, when you can get pretty close to whatever reference by generating normal from photos.
If you'd care to actually read the thread there's a mixture of both sculpting and painting to generate normals and heightmaps. To say that it's bad practice to paint heights and normals in photoshop is simply not true. "Most studios" aren't triple-A studios, and don't have the money to pay for high-end art, or keep a game…
There are so many ways to create textures... I personally used photo textures back when I started to learn the 3D stuff, but now I prefer a combination of hand drawing and sculpting. This challenges should be the perfect opportunity for you to just try out different approaches and see which one you prefer - although the…
while that great and all i thought the idea was to replicate the scene as best we can. alright but where should i start? my town will have none of the images i need so i can't take my own photos and i don't even know what to look for in an image. and the sculpting? i have assess to zbrush 4r but im a noob and even after…
Let's not be rude. I'm not suggesting you don't know what you're talking about, because you certainly do, I just think the point is debatable, and not simply method A is correct, method B is obsolete. Even in the great art dumps from people working on really big-budget titles that you find on this forum you'll frequently…