Luggage Rack

 

For the brass luggage racks that sit above the windows in the restaurant cars, I went about doing a few designs to make them a bit more decorative than my reference pics. I took my refined designs into max, with the intention to bake them onto planes and use alphas, as there would have been too much geometry to make them look good.

I also created some simple geometry, kind of a ribbon of planes, that would give the piece a bit of width, but as shown in the image below, the results turned out jagged with gaps and harsh lighting in certain places. It also bumped up the tri count a fair bit so i rebaked with just the original flat plane.

I was happy with the image above, although it did look very thin, it still looked clean. Then I thought of other ways of giving it a bit more depth, so I layered the alpha planes ever so slightly next to each other, which gave this convincing illusion of depth. The normal information on the extremeties of the alpha is just enough to catch the light and create this appearance.

Then I took it into nDo2 and created a few ornate patterns, and then gave it some ambient occlusion. To tweak it further I used blending options to add more shadows within the patterny bit, to give it a kind of tarnsihed effect. Then I baked a twisted cylinder for the pole, and created a simple weave pattern in photoshop for the mesh bit. 

 These two images show it in Max and UDK, with a 512x512 texture sheet, shrunk from the 2048 I created it at. Ideally it will be at 256 eventually. It actually looks pretty good at 256, except for the wirey mesh bit, which got completely destroyed, but to fix that i could multi sub obj that bit and apply a small res but high quality tileable weave pattern. I will see how it looks when i have the main interior finished though. The specs aren't final either, I may want to shine them up a bit. The asset drops in at 100 tris bang on. Tres bien