Modular Testing - James McAndrew Environment

Being the main environment artist it is up to me to get the level to look like the concepts produced by the concept artists. However as there isn't any concepts or level designs at the moment, as we are still in the very early stages of the game development process. Because of this i though that i might as well do a few testings and try outs to see what would work and what defiantly won't.
To this, as i know that at some point in the level there would be a traditional dungeon, brick wall environment. I thought that i would start to test how to get the best result for a normal mapped brick-like wall.

I started by really roughly blocking out a wall in maya. This worked kinda well and gave me foundations to build on.

This first attempt was just to see what the outcome would be like. The low poly didn't fit the shape of the bricks very well and the actual bricks themselves are pretty much all the same, there is only 4 or 5 variations. The low poly is very clearly visible in certain parts. I did try and make it so that there would be gaps in the wall. This is dank dirty poorly maintained area and the walls would show this, however i don't think this worked very well and don't look as good as i was hoping.

After a couple more attempts with this process i managed to get a result i was happy with. This later attempt worked a lot better than the previous did. I think this worked a lot better because the bricks were a lot squarer and a lot less rounded, this meant that the low poly could fit around the high poly a lot better. No i didn't sculpt all these bricks myself luckily there is an IMM brush in zbrush that has a number of variations of bricks and stones in. I really liked the outcome of this, however in an attempt to get some true depth and bring one of the brick out of the wall i brought the low poly out and this didn't work very well.

As the tri count for all in game assets is only 300,000 modular walls, floors, ceilings, etc... is the only really option as 5 of the same modular walls only count as one. So a relatively detailed models can be made. Also as we are also allowed to use normal maps this project. Highly detailed models and modular pieces (such as walls and floors) can be produced and baked down. The only tight limitation this project is the 100 texture sheet limit. As we have been talking about PBR textures and shaders, this number will quickly get used up.

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