IPP - Round Shield

So the next piece of armor that I decided to take on is known as the round shield. I decided to give it some of my own stylized design, as most round shields have a signature artifact in the center to signify alliance. At first thought, I felt that it would be best to just make a quick cylinder in Maya with a thin edge-loop so that I could extrude a border face.What I didn't know is that there is a problem that Mudbox would have with where all of the tri's converge on the cylinder; when I tried to sculpt near that convergence, a pseudo black hole / singularity would be created and bug the topology out. So from there, I decided that it would just be best to have the convergence be of quad-based topology. Fixed!

With clean UVs and good edgeflow, I decided to smooth to a relatively high level before bringing it into Mudbox. The reason for this is because I want to UVs to be smoothed as well so that the normal and color maps that I will extract will be far more accurate when I bring them back into Maya.

So I gave it its color and sculpt...

Then I plugged the color map and normal map into the shader that I have in Maya..!