Pillars

As the Pillars are assets the player will be walking past, it was important for the base to be of a high quality. As they are tall the tops are far from the player so I reduced the level of detail. The top of the pillar was created with just a low poly model but the base and middle section was high poly. Then from that I created the low poly version and baked out a normal map.

It was also important to create a high poly model as the mid section has indentations. Even at the lowest possible resolution in the mesh the tri count would have been very high. The normal map created some nice Lighting, but looking staright on without and light to catch the edges, the indentations couldn't be seen. An ambient occlusion map was baked out with the normals. This is then overlayed on the diffuse texture. This made the details pop and read a lot better.