The First Asset - Arch v1.0

So as fore mentioned in my previous post I said one of the assets I wanted to design was a entrance/arch. This was the first thing I needed to do and I did this all pretty quick so the results weren't very good. Despite this I learnt some things in ZBrush, like using Projection Master and Surface Noise.

The first step was to model a low res version in Maya that I would export into ZBrush for the more advance detailing. This was pretty simple.
I made a torus cut it in half, and added a cylinder in the middle. The plan was to make the actual arch itself ruined and mossy, and the centerpiece being the cylinder have a cool aztec-type pattern in the middle, just to give it emphasis that something big is coming up, which in our case was falling to your doom into a underground facility.

Next I exported both models as .objs and imported them both into ZBrush, I then opened one and appended the other, this works well in Zbrush because they'll be positioned exactly the same as they were positioned in Maya, so I wouldn't have to tweak the cylinder to be perfectly in the middle, which is a lot easier in Maya as opposed to ZBrush. I obviously had to subdivide both objects quite a bit so that I could polypaint and edit the surface properly without it having artifacts all over.

The first thing I did in ZBrush was add a surface noise using the following texture - as an alpha.

I did this on both of the objects using the same settings so that it would remain consistent.

Next up was polypainting the model to give it a stone-like, ruined feel to it. Before polypainting I filled the object with Matcap_Gray, I could've also used the plain white texture but I always prefer using the gray material. This is because I can add low and high values of colour well with having the middle-tone already set there.

I used the same texture as the alpha I used for the surface noise, turned brush on Mrgb, and colour spray and started spraying all over both objects, it didn't matter much about the positioning of the painting because I had to imitate the ruined look - which suggests the random element.

As for the centerpiece, this is where Projection Master came in. I imported the following image as an alpha, then turned on Projection Master for the actual positioning. I didn't need colour because I wanted it to slightly extrude from the cylinder and not be that different from the rest of the model. I used the following settings.

After turning that on, I just clicked anywhere on the front face of the cylinder and started to use the move and scale controls to perfectly align it in the cylinder and to be the right size, this is why projection master is so powerful.

The next steps would be to export the texture map, and also the normal map (for the bump map in maya), but I decided this asset wasn't 'powerful' enough to be an entrance to this ruined building.