Feedback, brick walls redux and more.

I recently had the opportunity to show my work to a member of IO interactive, who worked on the Hitman Absolution game the concept is created for. He looked at my progress and gave me some sound advice, which is really helpful:

• Use props creatively to add character to an environment
• Vertex painting is a must in UDK: make a room's walls and floors as visually interesting as possible
• Try different times of day to evaluate scene props
• Edge decals can add so much more to walls
• Soften the edges of the wood assets
• Inefficient to pack carpets into one 2k texture: be just as useful to split them up
• Use decals a lot more instead of separate textures

The biggest point made was about the brick texture: essentially, the texture was matcapped, and as such was subjected to the scene lighting prevalent inside ZBrush. To help me capture a better texture he shared his workflow, which proved to be extremely useful:

• DepthGrab the Zbrush 2.5d canvas and use that to displace another plane
• Use Decimation Master to reduce poly count on the hipoly mesh
• use Xnormal to bake normal, AO, cavity and curvature maps

Unfortunately, my cavity map was lacking: where specific bricks were there were black shapes on the map, where I assume the projection clipped through them, Also, for some reason xNormal crashed when rendering curvature maps, so I couldn't get that either. But...

Old brick flats left, new brick flats right.

But what I did get was a marked improvement in the texture: I resculpted the bricks to make them more cracked and less of a space between them, as per feedback, and applied and blended the maps I did get out of xNormal. Unfortunately, I have to polypaint the texture manually, but the direct lighting is gone! Hooray!

Here's the current scene. For the purposes of polypainting I have chosen to replace the entirety of the wall with a static mesh, with decent enough tesselation. I will be using edge decals and adding colour to the wall's diffuse when I go texture hunting this weekend.

Thanks for reading. I'm gonna need to step up the pace now to keep up with my peers, but i hope to improve.