The Staircase

The Staircase design was simple, although like my other assets I wanted it to be ruined and ancient, and all along the edges I wanted an extruding pattern just to give it that extra significance as an asset in the game world. This staircase would be huge so it would already be extremely noticeable, I just needed to add subtle details to it to make it a little more monumental than any old staircase that you'll find in this game.

I started work in Maya, and this was a simple design, it took around 10 minutes to do because it is just a staircase after all.

Once done in Maya, I exported one of the side objects, and the main staircase. I only needed to export one of the side objects because they would be identical and there's no point making extra work for myself when I can just duplicate it once the object is complete. As I've done with other assets I used automatic UV mapping on both these objects.

Once in ZBrush I followed the same techniques and steps to achieve my rocky and mossy, ancient look to the stairs.

It was the same process as other assets, turning the subdivisions higher, then using the same textures to polypaint all over the model. I did some deforming on the stairs too in the hope that it would follow over well in a normal or displacement map however this wasn't the case. I'm still new to all these different types of maps and how to use them effectively. 

I masked out a little pattern on the side object and moved it inwards a little using the transpose tool.

Once I was done in Zbrush I just exported the texture maps, and normal maps and moved back in maya to make the materials and assign the maps to the UV's.

 Unfortunately I pattern didn't follow over in the normal map and I didn't know what to do. I tried messing around with bump depth and some other options but nothing worked, it wouldn't show in a rendered version.

Although I was happy with the model as a whole, it really lacked detail I'd like to include, as mentioned in my first blog post I wanted the assets I made to be monumental in a way and definitely significant, although this staircase definitely lacked the detail needed to be something that significant, it was far too plain. I should have looked into incorporating patterns properly into the staircase asset.