How do people texture perfectly even details/normals for curved surfaces like armor?

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Detail_of_a_body_armour_from_Medieval_Europe._The_Burrell_Collection,_Glasgow,_UK
Detail_of_a_body_armour_from_Medieval_Europe._The_Burrell_Collection,_Glasgow,_UK4288×2848 3.94 MB

What’s the workflow involved for making details like this? I have a hard time imagining it’s just pure sculpting, it’s too precise. I feel like something like this you would make it in a 2D environment initially. My first thought was you somehow flatten your lowpoly to its UV coordinates and do sculpting/hard surface/booleans on the high poly in a flattened shape then bake. Or you make them in a photoeditor with greyscale and convert that to normals with a program, but the quality is not the best if you do that I’ve heard.

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It’s sculpting- just with alpha brushes

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Ah so you would make those in 2D and then just project them? But what if the detail cannot be projected from one view? I.E if the detail curves around the shoulderplate or something to that extent. If it’s one continuous detail, going around a curve, it can’t really be projected with an alpha brush right? For example the details on the shoulder-plate here. I can only see it working if you lay it out flat first somehow. Granted you could probably sculpt this traditionally on this specific example. But what if it was something more difficult than that? With a lot of very even shapes and specific spacings.

stock-photo-detail-of-the-upper-part-of-an-armor-of-medieval-knight-741330448
stock-photo-detail-of-the-upper-part-of-an-armor-of-medieval-knight-7413304481500×1231 574 KB

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You can do it without scultping I am quite sure, I never tried it but I think you can just get a texture like this, shader map it and then apply displacement to a subdivided mesh. That should do the trick BUT I as i said I have never tried displacement mapping on little detailed stuff like this so it is a suggestion you can try, it isnt hard to do it anyways so you know, try it and if it works might save you a lot of time.

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Oh ok you can’t do this with displacement mapping I am quite sure

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You can use any texture as brush and paint in 3D from whatever view you want… also using only that part of the texture you want to “rub onto the surface”… using the stamb feature…

2 Likes
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Maybe they would have some video preview later.
My bet: its just normals from height map with ornament in the lastest texturing state. Or, maybe, alpha in sculpting stage.
Afaik zbrush can add displacement map with UV. So it just unwrapping some parts, draw some alpha, and apply displacement.

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I just answered this question yesterday in your other thread…

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Do you think this addon is worth getting for stamps?