Abnormal Normal Mapping

yaaaawn!!
Ok finally caught up on my hub modeling, the mushrooms are in the right place, the doorways all line up and the walkways look pretty cool!! also got them checked off by the art director so yay!
But today marks a pretty big achievement... well almost achievement.
I managed to successfully normal map my vine design for the central pillar!!
wooo! this doesn't sound like a whole lot but as you will see in the pictures this was quite an undertaking.

The first picture showes the original hub from about a week ago.  This was quite radically changed adding an emphasis on vertical camera views and more interesting use of character directing.  The new platforms and mushrooms really add a sense of wow as you enter the room!
So as you can see from the second and third picture the central vines were quite a key part of the design.  This is a little tricky however since there are more polygons in the vines than there is in the rest of the room by about a factor of 10 or so :p
To fix this I originally tried to normal map the entire stack onto one low poly cylinder.... this didnt work out and instead yielded a kinda cobweby very low res tower.  After talking with my 3D tutor Ben I was informed that trying to project a single untiled texture over such a large column was a bad idea... makes sense now cant believe I didnt think about it at the time :p
So the next stage involved creating a flat tillable 3D texture and then wrap it around the low poly column instead.
The current stage as shown in the 4th pic is pretty nice I think.  The texture is only 258x258 in resolution and needs a little tweaking to get the tillable look perfect but for now that will do! I think I may even sculpt the 3D vines in mudbox quickly to give them a cool look as well.  Depends on time I guess.
anyway more photos!!

There is one last picture I would like to add which I found as I was going through my phone to find the above pictures.  This is a bit of a memento to what I thought wold be a cool adition to the level but ultimatley became redundant after this second change.  The corkscrewy spindly cool twisty barrier roots!

Yea kinda looks like a poo but I had these looking cool in mudbox and animated to twist into the floor as the player got close!
I'm glad I got to make them though! maybe they will make their way into another game some day.
So off to bed now, presentation in about 10 hours or so! wow I can actually get a nice amount of sleep tonight yay!