pillar # 2

I made another pillar for this sci fi environment I'm working on. I like this one a lot more than the previous pillar I made. I think there's more subtle color variation in the metal which I think works well.

I made 90% of the normal map using this amazing program called ndo2. I guess you can describe it as sculpting program/add-on for photoshop. It's a pretty ingenious program. The other 10% was high poly modeling to give the object smooth corners.

This youtube tutorial pretty much goes through all the awesome stuff you can do with the program. I just found out about the program yesterday but it's no doubt going to speed up my work flow significantly.

hand painted pillar

I played a little of Star Wars: The Old Republic during the free trial last week and I was really impressed with its graphics. It's not hyper-realistic Crysis-like but I think it's really beautiful with colorful stylized graphics. I like how most things look pretty low poly but have really strong normals that pop. So I decided to try and make some models with a hand painted look and give them normals that push details. As I look at it now, I think the texture could use a bit more color in the metals

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