After learning a bit about zBrush, xNormal, and Mudbox, I wanted to apply them to a personal project. I decided to use ArenaNet's art test as practice. However it's probably going to be going outside bounds of their guidelines (3k tris and no texture sheets more than 2 1024s or something like that). The rest of the building is still WIP.
What I really wanted to try here was to create a brick wall using placing primitive cubes in a row to lay out the brick wall. Then I would go into zBrush and quickly sculpt in some details. Finally I would go back into 3ds Max and recreate the low res geometry of the wall and use xNormal to bake the normal maps and ambient occlusion into my textures.
3ds Max brick wall layout using primitives
zBrush sculpt for one section of the wall
Recreated low poly geometry for the wall, and
using xNormal to bake out my normal + AO maps to apply to it.
I guess it's a decent start, but I may end up going back to a drawing board to find a more efficient way to do all this. Practice wise, it was a good learning experience for me. For now, I'll continue on with the rest of the building and see how it goes..
