Nixon Troll

The first small research project I completed was a simple troll head. Starting with a couple of orthos I doodled over summer I set out to model a low poly mesh, sculpt and paint it up in zbrush then export the maps out and stick them on the original low poly mesh in maya.
Above the Orthographics I worked from, and below the initial low poly mesh (Left) with a subdivided counterpart (right).At this stage I made my UV map (on the low poly mesh) by creating a seam from the back of his neck upto the top of his head, and also removed the horns to reduce deformation. Once the UV is made you cannot go back and begin editing the mesh, moving vertices is ok but I found out the hard way that if you begin merging or creating verts then the UV map will need to be created again, along with any other completed texture maps.

Next I fired up Zbrush and began to sculpt in the details, initially I found the navigation in Zbrush to be a little tricky as it focuses on moving the object rather than the camera however I soon got used to it and really enjoyed sculpting in the texture. The results can be seen below.Once the sculpting was completed I changed the material to a standard grey one and began poly painting, which I could then export as my difuse map (colour). Below is a quick video of the finished sculpt, ready for map exports.

One issue I had when exporting my maps from Zbrush was with the normal map. At first I generated the map from object space (below top) which took into account the direction of normals in a set 3D environment, so once it was applied to my low poly mesh I started getting very strange shadows comming from the normal as it had transfered information about the whole object. What I needed was a normal map generated from the tangents of the poly(below bottom). This way it would be effected by whatever environment I put it in. The Last two maps, Displacement and Diffuse, were quite straightforward in comparrision, only thing to note is that in Zbrush you need to generated a displacement map before you can get your normal map.
As the whole project was based around getting the most from low poly meshes I used the displacement map as a specular map. The end result you can see below, I found mental ray was far better at producing results with the normal map. I also applied the same textures to the higher subdivided model as comparison.