WIP: Rock Pedestal

I am working on a rock pedestal for a game character model. The image above is the final version of the sculpt.

You may ask why I am modelling when I am a VFX artist. I like modelling. I studied at CG Protege as a modelling student. Later I was offered a position in the VFX department of Tiny Island Productions, and I regarded modelling as a hobby. Now, I feel it is time for me to revisit modelling.

Two incidents made me want to revisit modelling. The first incident was during Dominic Qwek's Creature Design and Development Masterclass. Watching Dominic sculpting a creature made me want to work with ZBrush again.

The other incident was during David Kwok's IP Development course. I signed in for the class because I want to know how I can develop my own IP. Back then I thought my IP will be an animation short that I will do sometime in the far future, perhaps. The class made me rethink the concept of IP. It made me realize that whatever I am working on can be an IP (depending on what I do with it). The most important thing is to start (and finish) a project. So I decided it was time for me to start modelling projects.

Back to the rock pedestal, here are images to show my sculpting progress. I started with a box, shaping it using Move brush. This resulted in stretched polygons, as the right image below shows.

I used Remesher to get a uniform topology; then continued shaping the rocks using Clay Buildup, Move, Flatten, and Polish brushes.

At this point, I used Remesher one more time because some polygons are visibly stretched as I somewhat forcefully added details to the model.
When finalizing the details, I started using the Pinch brush to get sharp edges. I kept reminding myself to maintain the balance between sharp edges and smooth surface; but I may have gone overboard with it.

Version 3 is almost identical to the final version. I simply spent two more days adding details before decided that the sculpt is final.

What is next? The next step, which is what I am working on right now, is retopology, creating a lower resolution model. Here is a screenshot of what I have currently.

While retopology is progressing, I can work on projecting the base texture onto the high resolution sculpt. Texture projection comes after that. Finally, combining the rock pedestal with the character model is the finishing step.

Feel free to hit the comment button and tell me what you think.

Fixing Normal Map Seams

Baking normal maps for low-poly models may result in annoying seam lines, as shown in the image below.

Notice the seam lines: along the right arm, across the left shoulder, along the middle of the head.

These lines happen along the edges where I broke the UV. I thought this meant that the cause was related to the UV. The cause turns out to be gamma correction problem: the normal map should be read with gamma 1 instead of the default 2.2.

Reading the normal map with gamma 1.0.

And here is the fixed render.

Seam lines fixed.

Credit: I got this tip from this thread at CG Society forum: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=1187474

There are many possible causes for a normal map problem. This is just one of them. If you have problems with your normal map, feel free to ask me either by commenting to this post or by sending me an email :)