One of the main things I wanted to tackle with this scene was the Quixel SUITE. Prior to this project I’d not really used any of the texture software available and mainly just used a standard photoshop approach. After doing my research on the various texture packages available I settled on Quixel because of how it looked to integrate seamlessly into my current workflow. I didn’t really have to learn any new software because of how it works along side Photoshop so was very intuitive to use. The large quantity of free tutorials also made it super easy to learn the more complex parts of the software. What made this software so useful was the ability to create a custom material that I could use across multiple assets and using the same parameters to get a consistent amount of dirt/damage throughout the scene. The main example of this is the wood sections in the scene, the reference I gathered showed that all pillars, trims, doors and paneling used the exact same material throughout. In Quixel I created a new lacquered wood using the smart material settings from the existing Lacquered wood materials already in the Quixel SUITE, this ensured I had physically accurate materials and meant I didnt have to waste time creating my own smart material, I just adjusted a few setting and added an extra dirt layer to suit my desired results. Because of all this time saving it meant I could spend more time creating the high poly models and adding my own zbrush details. In a few days I managed to have all my wood sections complete and used this same technique on the ceiling plaster and even the cardboard sheets and boxes. For the most part my workflow was creating the high poly in 3DS Max for the main details and then adding the smaller details in Zbrush such as the floral patterns, surface noise and even adding text and embossing using alphas, but later on I started to rely more on Ndo to extract normals from images for the subtle wood grain and also creating all the text and branding on the fire extinguisher. All the sliders and variations available in Ndo made it super quick to create all the variation I needed in the text and boarders on the extinguisher with very little effort. Now I wouldn’t recommend you just throw images in there and expect perfect normals because thats not really what it is for but if you really want some subtle surface noise or to create normals from a height map you have created in photoshop then this can save so much time rather than working with a heavy sub divisioned mesh in Zbrush.

Making Use of Displacement