I had an itch to sculpt and there are a few things in this scene that are made from cast iron, such as the archway and the chairs. Having lived in Savannah, GA I was very familiar with these accents and gathered some reference for the chair. I was able to find some nice studio shots as well as antique sellers with photos.
This seemed like a fun and complex piece to put some effort into. I started with the back and projected on of the more front on images onto a plane in ZBrush as an alpha. This gave me ballpark shapes and outlines but left all of the interior design work to hand sculpting.
This resulted in a very hi-poly model that did not make sense to work with in the scene so the plan was to bake it down to a low res mesh. To save a bit of time the low-poly was made with Zremesher but I plan to go back and properly retopo this to present it as a game-ready asset.
Next up I made the seat and legs based off of the reference images. The seat was made using traditional poly modeling and then dynameshed in ZBrush to make it look welded and cohesive. Then 1/12 was retopoed in Topogun 3, mirrored and the duplicated in a circle, completing the seat. The legs were sculpted in ZBrush and retopoed in Topogun as well.
The high and low poly chairs were assembled in ZBrush and the low was sent to Rizom UV to unwrap, then both were sent to Marmoset Toolbag 4 to bake. On the left you can see the high poly, the middle is low poly with normal map, and the right is the low:
With the bake done I decided to try out Marmoset’s new texturing toolset for fun and got some cool, quick results!