I'm sorry for this break. I was in Spain with my family and looking for another room (London is really expensive!).
The intention of this challenge was achieve the maximum detail with minimum polygons and maps. I wanted to make a brick wall. Obviously, I never use this in a real video game (maybe in a mobile platform) but it was an excellent exercise to me.
First I sculpted the bricks alone in Zbrush. It's no necessary make a pixel-size detail because when you baked the normal map may be appear some artifacts. So it's better make two normal map one with the bricks and other with the detail extract from the diffuse and overlay them.
I prefer use decimation master and export a medium poly mesh into 3DS Max and make little changes (rotations, scales...) to make a non repetitive pattern. However It must be tilelable so be carefully with the borders. To be sure I prefer use one of the bricks and halve. I put a basic diffuse map that later I will use as a base.
Ok..so..now I baked the diffuse, normal map, Ambient occlusion (with Vray light material and Vray dirt, but you can do with Mental Ray) and a color variation (different levels of grey for each brick) into a single plane. Normally I like to make a gradient ramp just place a UVWmap modifier over the wall to make an effect dark below and bright over (normally below there's more humidity so it become darker). Mixing the layer in Photoshop we have a good diffuse
Ok but this is not a ruin..it's just a brick wall. So it need moss and specular power and a little bit of debris.
Ok much better. Now apply the color variation map and increase the contrast to improve the volume:
Mmmm yeah...ok. Now from this diffuse can make a great detail normal map just desaturate it and increase the contrast with levels filter and a specular map with hi pass filter and levels (and maybe another couple of filters). So we have 3 maps (in UDK we can reduce to two using the blue channel to put the specular, or making a specular map using the diffuse map):
and this is the final result:
In just one plane (2 tris).
Normally is better take a lowpoly plane but with some volume, ledges and other interest stuff. But it's a interesting exercise. I hope that you enjoy with this!!
