So after rethinking the design of the arch I decided that an arch wouldn't be enough on it's alone so I wanted an entire entrance-way with pillars, to give it a more epic feel.
This was the design I initially came up with, and I decided to take it further into maya straight away, because I felt this was a much stronger design than simply an arch and centerpiece like my previous one.
It's also much more noticeable when you walk through this, compared to the original arch I made, although maybe there still could be a place somewhere in the map for the other arch to go, even though it wouldn't be as significant.
Modelling the pillars was the only object in the entrance that would not just be a default cube for example. I wanted there to be indents on the pillar so I just inserted edge loops and started to scale them in a little. There was nothing complicated about it, because I wanted most of the work to go in the texturing of these pillars and the rest of the model.
This is how it turned out, exactly how I pictured during my designing. I was happy with this and knew I could further this model and bring it into ZBrush to texture. I knew that I could also texture these things in Maya too, but I feel it's a lot more creative and free in ZBrush polypainting as opposed to making materials in Maya, so I choose to polypaint first.
Before I send it into ZBrush I'll need to UV map a lot of parts of this model, so I just did automatic mapping for the majority, just tweaking little bits as I saw fit, exported all the objects and put them into ZBrush.
As usual I'd have to subdivide the object up quite a bit so that I could actually paint it, then I just got stuck in, using similar techniques to the previous arch I made. More importantly I used the same textures - I wanted this to be consistent of me so that all my models and assets look like they belong to the same environment, the same game. If all my models looked different it would be a waste because they just wouldn't fit in the game as well as consistently textured ones would.
This was the finished texturing on the pillar. Compared to the previous image it looked a little more varied. I added some more stone texturing to it and also the broken up rocks towards the bottom were too strong I felt so I used the same texture (Default in ZBrush), on a much lower RBG Intensity so that it wouldn't show as much.
Finally I wanted some displacement involved for a normal map I'd make so I used the blob brush on the spray function and just did it randomly all over. I also finished texturing the top of the pillar too. I felt this pillar fit well into the aztec ruins theme, so I kept to it and decided that I could export the textures out from ZBrush.
This is where those UV's I made come in handy now, because the object was exported from maya with the UV's, they still remain in ZBrush.
This was all I had to do to make my texture maps, create a new one from the polypaint I just did on the model. As you can see the UV's in that box are still there. I'll then click 'Clone Txtr' so that it moves into the texture palette on the left, but before I export it out, ZBrush flips the UV's from maya vertically for some reason, so I'll have to flip those again, and then export.
I did this for the rest of the objects but it wasn't as interesting because they were all just really simple cuboids. I did the same method to export the texture maps too.
In Maya I made a new blinn material and chose colour from file and just chose the texture maps I had exported from ZBrush, and then assigned the material to the object with the correct UV's.
As you see from the image above there is a file2 also allocated into the bump map, this was the normal map I had created from the ZBrush file too. For a long time I couldn't see what the bump map did at all, I thought it wasn't working no matter what settings I had it on, but I found out that I had to render the model to see what it actually looks like. When I put the bump settings on max it looked crazy so I toned down the bump values to this.
This is how the low res model actually turned out to look like. I think it fitted in perfectly with the whole ancient ruins theme, except I wasn't too happy on the level of detailing I put into it. I think I should have further studied different types of maps, for example displacement maps to really get finishing touches into the model to mimic an actual 3d object because when you look at it really closely you can tell it's all very flat.
Things I'll need to improve on for assets down the line would definitely be how to texture efficiently and use different types of maps to detail the object properly, including normal maps and displacement maps, they're also maps that I've never tried out like ambient occlusion and specularity maps too. Although I wouldn't really need specular maps for something so rocky and ruined.
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