Further random low poly testing - James McAndrew Environment

We are in a weird subdued moment as a team. Due to unforeseen circumstances we are again unable to make the level that was originally designed and have to again redesign the level to fit, not having most of the scripts that would make the game... a game. While i wait for a new design that matt has taken under his wing, i thought i would go back a look over parts of the project.

I looked at the lo polys that i had and while i am some what happy with what i have made i know that i could produce something that fits the higher poly much better. This meant going back into Zbrush to review the high. Thanks to a lesson we had with phil i have a much better idea as to how to produce a fitting low poly. Essentially i took the high poly model that i have and decimated it until i was under 2k polys, i then took the decimated mesh into maya and cleaned the mesh up a little. Merging verts and deleting unseen faces meant i could get a mesh that was a much better fit. The cost of this better lower poly mesh means that it is a lot higher than the original mesh i have now.   

     
This is the newer, better low poly that i may be tempted to use (with a quixel texture slapped on). Looking straight on the meshes look relatively similar, the occlusion really brings out the gaps between the bricks. However the real different comes when looked at the mesh from the side, which is what the player will be seeing in the game. Here the bricks actually have some depth to them and doesn't just look like a flat plane which they do as of now. I really do like this way of doing the low poly and think that it is a much better way of doing things, at the cost of more polys, which is why i many not be able to do this. 
Another thing that i hadn't accounted for when redoing the low poly is that these meshes may not fit together as well as the current meshes do. If i have time i will defiantly do experimenting with this more.   

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