[Door] Mudbox and Normal Mapping

My next step was to add finishing details in Mudbox. I wanted my door to have a cobbled appearance, with the center parts having a more metallic feel. The most efficient way of doing this is to sculpt the desired detail in Mudbox followed by exporting the detail as a Normal Map into Maya. This would retain the detail of the original sculpt but without the performance issue of having to render a high number of polygons.

Before I worked on my final model, I tested the Normal Map process on an early version of my door with fewer parts. I went up to subdivion 6 or 7 in Mudbox (totalling around 2.5million polys), and was happy with the look of my door.

At this stage when I tried to export the Normal Map through the 'New Operation' panel, I ran into several problems. The first being that due to the high number of polygons in my model, the exporting time was horendous. After 11hours it still hadn't exported on Subdivion 7 and Mudbox went into 'Non-responding' mode. I then tried to export on Subdivion 3, which took about 90 minutes to complete. When I opened in Maya, I realised that the Normal Map obviously won't add and subtract geometry, which is what I had done in Mudbox to get that cobbled appearance. For this reason there was clipping on the edges of the model that I had pulled out slightly.

I then began work in Mudbox on my final mesh, with much more knowledge of how the entire procedure would work.

This was what my final sculpt looked like - retaining much more of the original shape so that no clipping would occur when it was imported into Maya. Unfortunately this again was done at Subdivion 6 and wouldn't export after 8hours, so I decided to export it at Subdivion 2 into Maya, then simply do the turntable from Mudbox. I may do a turntable of my original sculpt as well as an addition.