3D Practice - Brick Wall - Example

Today was my first day getting truly back into 3D. I had bought this book - 'Game Environments and Props' - a while back and now it was time to use it. I was needing a useful refresher into 3D as well as learning efficient modelling and texturing techniques. I had a quick skim through this book and it looks fantastic. Today I began with the first project: 'Creating a Brick Wall'.

The main idea of this project was to create an efficient and detailed looking wall. The finished piece you see above (bottome right) is merely a 2D plane. This is something I have looked to achieve for years. A fantastic looking, tillable, brick wall that has 1 poly face and that's it.

In order to accomplish this I had to create a high resolution wall that would be used to create all the textures needed for the low resolution wall. Even creating the high res mesh was simple to do. Simply creating a couple of different bricks, duplicating them and rotating/slightly changing them, in order for a more random unique wall. Once this was complete I used the 'Transfer Maps' function to create my Normal, Diffuse and Ambient Occlusion map. Editing these in Photoshop allowed me to come out with the result above.

This is something I have been wanting to achieve for a long time. In all fairness though, the texture file used for the brick was one that the writer gave (via CD). So what I want to do is carry out this task again, perhaps make a different type of wall, and make everything my own - textures etc. The only complex feature that happened during this tutorial was using Photoshop, mainly because there was a lot of precision in figures and filters etc which I am not all too familiar with. However, hopefully carrying out this tutorial a second time will help make e more comfortable with such settings.

These are important exercises for me as I am really looking to create a fantastic and more importantly, an efficient environment. This exercise has been vital into giving me insight on how too do so. Next I will carry out this exercise again and generate a professional looking asset and professional looking evaluation. This is so I can go back and see what I learnt and what the techniques used were.