Right this week I’m doing normal maps via baking a high poly sculpt in Zbrush, why? Well I feel my model have few points of detail to draw your eye to. So I’m just going to add some engravings on parts I want to draw the eye to. To keep in brief I’ll keep the main sakes of the engravings simple, then just do the detail within finely; it was inspired by the aestheticists movements love of compact areas of detail. (That and I can also imagine the owner of the gun would want something of his to at least look good while killing enemies)
However there is a spanner in my plan. When I first imported my model into Zbrush all was well so I subdivided it (to make the normal map look far better by having it more detailed). It was all going well, so I subdivided 5 more times, at this point it was lagging like no tomorrow, but hey the detail was looking good!
Then it crashed.
I tried this a few times and every time my work crashed. So I decided to break apart my model and sculpt it bit by bit, and it worked splendidly! Sadly that makes getting a clay render of it… difficult to say the least, but hey it looks good!
Also, me being a fool but the symmetry modifier on, so I only got half of the normal maps on there, so instead of resculpting I just physically coped an pasted and warped it into the correct places on the other side. I tried my best to fix any errors and issues there could be on the normal, I know there may be one or two, but I think it is looking acceptable.
(my low poly with the finished sculpted normal maps applyed)