Help with texturing this object....

#1

I modeled this chair in zbrush with the thought that maybe I could sell it as a 3d stock object.

When I retopologized in Blender, I realized I overshot my poly budget by 3k. My blender model now has a 4330 poly count:

My questions are:
A) I was thinking of selling this chair as a game asset. With such a high poly count, I doubt it would sell. Am I right or wrong?
B) If I can’t sell it as a game asset, can I sell it to the arch/viz/movie/fx industry?
C) If I sell to the arch/viz/movie/fx industry instead, should I increase my poly count? Now I want to keep it as low poly as much as I can in the odd chance that a game developer does buy it, but if increasing the poly count will attract other markets, should I do it?
D) I barely have any experience with creating textures. I always spend more time on modeling/sculpting that anything else. If I keep my model a 4k poly, how do I go about texturing it to capture all the sculpted details?
E) Should I use a 4k texture normal? Or a 2k/1k texture normal map?
F) Can a 2k/1k texture normal map even capture all the details?
G) If you were the designer of this chair, how would you model it to be optimal? (low poly low texture size, etc).

Thanks, any help slapping some sense into this always-a-newbie would be greatly appreciated.

#2

Game programmers often model much higher detailed versions of the in game geometry to bake the higher details into the more efficient package.

I think you should set 3 LOD goals and have one version optimized bare-bones for game implementation. A middle version that smooths the edges some but still relies mostly on texturing for detail that might go into a game in the future when poly counts rise or in a small scene where you have few highly detailed objects, maybe as background objects for a high resolution mental ray render. Then the master version with as many polys as you want and displacement the works to generate normal maps and your lighting etc.

Ive only had limited experience with baking in details and it was years ago so my intel may be dated.

#3

Thanks Litheria, I’ll definitely take into account LOD

#4

Hello edgarEj.

If I get it correctly you modeled this chair in single solid piece. Don’t be afraid to use floating geometry, your polycount gets a lot lower. Also, fluting can be suggested with a normal map. You could try alpha mapped planes for the lower legs decoration as well, even if this chair is really sturdy in character.
As far as selling it goes, if texturing is photorealistic then you can sell a high polycount version for general visualization ( high polycount with a grain of salt, I don’t mean 100k polys…)

I hope this helps.

#5

stenofo

I thought about alpha mapped planes also, but I never thought about just splitting the geometry into different pieces like you suggested with the floating geometry. I was so gungho on having it one piece that I should have rethought my approach. Thanks for the advice stenofo.