Wall Piece

Hi there !!

Today I started my new demo reel. It will have two pieces (o maybe three): A cave as a inner, and a mountain-forest village as outside. I want both to experiment with lights and specially with cube or spherical environment maps.
So here I am. Today I made a rocky cliff piece. I started modelling a hi-poly on Zbrush.

I prefer export this model to 3D Max using Decimation Master and use the same mesh to make a Low-poly model with pro optimizer. It really save a lot of time!!. Then I unwrap this low-poly model and bake normal map. Other people likes unwrap directly in Zbrush... well... it's a matter of taste.
Now come the ambient occlusion to get detail to diffuse map. I always use Vray (I love it, thanks Chaos Group!!) to make a good AO map. For this, I use Vray light material with Vray Dirt Map.
Then in photoshop mix my normal map with the normal map that I get to the difusse map (with NDO2, crazybump, pixplant,...) For a best AO mix the blue channels from this normal with my Vray AO. And this is the result:

So this is my base. Now I use UDK to make details and make a really good normal map. For save memory I always clean the blue channel of the normal map and put there my AO map, so I have normal and AO map in the same picture without alpha channel (I always use a DXT3 maps to keep low my memory footprint and reduce engine memory calls).
And  final result in UDK is this:

Now use vertex paint to bland textures,one for the surface, and this for the rocks.
So I hope that like you

See you in space !!