I wanted to take a break from the environment scene and started modeling a hardsurface mask. I´ll finish this one up and give it a full on PBR treat. Looking forward to this...

This was a one day job since i wanted this to be over as fast as possible. Build the base Highpoly and quickly made the lp with cage in Max. Then baked and textured it. UE4 PBR metal shading is awesome. I quickly thew it intro Maya and made it spin. Since i wanted to put at least a bit of love and interests in the "animation" i decided to give the main base a little shiver so you, again like the other fan with the moving cloth, can feel the motion. 

Also ingame every base (starting rotation) is different so they dont look to similar. Even if you can´t tell it, you´d feel it!

I think its the small things that matter and makes for a great scene... 

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Ingame shot without animation

I wanted to give the new Quixel suite a try and build a cute little fan in 3ds max that i wanted to animate via maya. I attached a bit of cloth to it so you can "feel" the wind. Makes for an interesting environment asset. Thinking of making some ceiling fans aswell. Giving the scene a bit more life piece by piece.

Highpoly in 3DS Max

Rig and animation in Maya

Update on what I´m doing right now:

Created three basic highpoly tables (again references through AMCs Mad Men) and baked their normals to a lowpoly. Next step will be the adding of normal details through nDo2 and texturing the albedo/reflectivity/microsurface and bake the AO.

The destroyed_wall textures as well as the walls_bottom textures are done and added to the environment.

Also added more details in the gold frame normal

Ingame shot with wall textures 

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Click image for higher resolution

Finished the chair PBR texturing and added a polycount blanket for the fun of it

Step 1: Create subdivided plane with planar UV mapping (for easy baking later) and create the highpoly blanket via nCloth physics, tweek attributes, maybe add some stickiness too and add a few animated passive colider to get the blanket where you want it (: Don´t forget to take copies of the blankets that you may use and create a little library to choose from. It can be tricky to achieve the perfect/desired look.

Maya nCloth to efficiently simulation a realistic blanket highpoly in seconds

Step2: Retopo the blanket. Make sure to triangulate certain spots so that the smoothing groups don´t look to sharp. Importing a mesh from Maya to Max may require some edit normal tweeks since some of my vert normals needed to be unified or they would shade ugly artifacts on the lowpoly and bake!

Step3: Create a CAGE that is kinda close to the highpoly so you even get into the foldings and crinkles of the blanket. It is NOT necessary to get every detail but rather the silhouette of the mesh and a clean look through the smoothing groups in the lowpoly. To avoid a big push for the CAGE try to change the verts of the lowpoly while looking if the CAGE modifier multiplier is enough to cover the mesh.

Rather than a bigger push, tweek the lowpoly again

Step4: Bake your highpoly normal, Bake to Textures (Albedo polycount logo and tileable normals) and your AO. (You may wanna create an nDo2 AO from the FINAL ingame normal and multiply your xNormal AO over it since this is the map that gets all the real infos from the highpoly depth!)

Baking not only the albedo but other maps is very helpfull 

And that's that! I think what makes this workflow so unique, cool and fast is the possibility to rebake something like the albedo or in my case the logo in seconds by just creating another texture without having to worry about fitting the texture to the UV layouts of the mesh. If i felt like making the smiley smaller or pull out another of his teeth, because I´m cruel like that, wouldn't be a problem whatsoever. 

And just talking about that makes me wanna change the logo again since its so easy and gives one the capability to just concentrate on the art rather the irritation of UVs.  But it´s like 3am. Geez (: