Fairy Lights! Progress update

I haven't updated in a while, so I thought I would show you what I've been up to.
Here's a shot of the current environment:

As you can see, I have used fairy lights to brighten up the ceiling. In the research I have done of hippie interior design, fairy lights are often used in conjunction with tapestry to decorate walls and ceilings, so I thought since my apartment's ceiling is a tad dull, it could use some brightening up.

The fairy lights themselves are simply made: I used Twist modifier on some cylinders in Max to make the normal map for the wires, and simply used emissive maps and cylinders to make the bulbs themselves.

Other assets I have textured this week include the mattress and the beanbags, which were factory-made but still organic assets which required both Max Modelling and sculpting.

The beanbags themselves were created firstly in Max, however the placeholder wasn't unwrapped efficiently for texturing so all the beanbags had to be remodelled. I began by using Max to place the seams between fabrics by chamfering edges and pulling edges in, then making them a separate smoothing group and Turbosmoothing.

After testing the bake of the seams worked, I then took the lowpoly and used a combination of soft selection and adding edge loops to create organic sag. My plan was to import this into ZBrush and use a height map generated from the previous mesh to place the seams, though this produced strange results so I opted to repeat the same technique again to make the seams again before I export.

Here's a shot of my sculpt. As with my sofa I used custom alphas and the standard brushes to add bulge and weight, and the used the subtractive Clay brush to add holes and wear. The sculpt came out much better than expected and took almost no time at all :)

In making the final model I had unwrapped in such a way that I could load in a variety of textures into the diffuse and alter it easily, so I made three diffuse variants of the beanbags. 

This one is more patchwork and has a more homemade look that would appeal to hippies. That and mushrooms.

And this one is more basic.

The mattress was another interesting asset to create. The hardest part to do adequately was the padding on the cushion, as I had chosen this image as reference:

I retopologised and unwrapped the mattress, and then put it in ZBrush. I used a custom alpha I made in Photoshop to make initial indents where the sponge bunched and the button was located, which I will share:

I then sculpted to pull the fabric up around this and then added folds and creases to suggest tension. 

It actually came out rather well, and made for a nice bake.

In the diffuse I used yellowing and burn marks in order to suggest wear.

Here's the mattress in the level. Wondering why I added it? The floor in the concept seemed unnaturally clear, and I would have imagined that due to the state of the apartment the hippies would want to sleep on the floor of their pad. In the future I hope to drape some duvet or blanket over it and maybe put a few props on it to add story.

Well, that was long.. If you're still reading I hope you learned from my mistakes and figured out some techniques  of your own for organic assets.

Thanks for reading :)