Sofa So Good: A tiny update

Just a brief update before the next: I have been working on the sofa this week, which proved more of a challenge that I initially thought. As I'm feeling good about overcoming them and stupid for falling for them, I will detail the issues encountered below;

I began with sculpting the highpoly of the sofa in Zbrush as planned, and this went well initially.I split the mesh up in the above manner for baking to avoid the meshes clipping or the raycasting catching the surface of the other objects: since I was dispensing with unique UV space to keep with my texture budget, these pieces are all I needed to sculpt. 

 The first problem I encountered was that doing the taselled ridges on sections where the fabric has been stitched relied on hand movement in Zbrush, and thus wouldn't be as perfect as I would want. The solution was to make those ridges in max and Turbosmooth to ensure their form fit the shape of the mesh.

After I finished, I baked and thought my problems were over: I then learned after previewing in Toolbag that despite my penchant for optimal UV usage, the arm rests were uniquely laid out and thus low-res.

I knew I could go higher-res, so I chose not to settle for it and remade the mesh to make those arm rests share texture space, thus making them much sharper and making less of my sculpting work go to waste. In the process, I made another mistake of messing up the UVs on the back of the sofa, but planar mapping and careful tweaking sorted that out.

More problems abounded when I learned that I couldn''t export OBJs out of Max without it taking forever, so I opted for Max baking of normals when the going got tough. I learned here that when Max bakes normals, the Green channel is inverted, and must be flipped in Photoshop.

But eventually, I made the final sofa after hours of tweaking. In the sculpting and texturing, I tried my best to make the sofa look beaten-up and well-used, without going over the top, and it turned out quite nicely. 

I also tweaked the geometry of the final model slightly, which made it look more flimsy and also disguise the re-use of textures.

I've yet to put the new asset in the engine, but that's for the next update.

Thanks for reading :)