Damaged Pillar: Doric Column

After struggling for a while to model my first pillar design, I moved onto something a little more achievable. I began to design the low poly mesh as a Doric Column.

After placing all of the largest shapes in the correct areas, extruding and combining the bottom and top half; I was ready to export the mesh from Maya as an OBJ file and import it to Zbrush.

Whilst in Zbrush I attacked my column with all of the wear and tear I wanted to see on the final render.

I realized I had missed a step in decimating my mesh, as the damaged sections were far too high in tri count in comparison to the rest of my mesh.

I decimated my mesh in Zbrush then reimported it. From left to right are the; Decimated, Low Poly, Damage and High Poly meshes. The damage now had to be bridged onto the low poly.

Bridging 1

Bridging 2

This process is not exactly difficult, but it is one of the most time consuming tasks I have ever encountered. It can become quite dull after a while, though the finished result is worth the effort.

UV mapping

Baking

Something went horribly wrong with my bake and the normals were crushed, stretched and distorted. I spent a long time attempting to fix this as can be seen below.

My first UV map, which did work, but it wasn't densely packed enough to make use of the 2048x2048 resolution.

I encountered issues with this map and I am still unsure why. The low poly and cage were both the exact same topology and the high poly was in the exact same position.

I decided it would be easiest to map the whole model again as opposed to puzzling over it for hours on end.

Here can be seen my final UV map, which worked perfectly. I am extremely happy to have this finished.