This was my first time officially using ZBrush to apply displacement to the steps I am making for our scene. These stills are from the turntable I made for our session with DreamWorks. During this process I learned a lot of how NOT to do displacement in ZBrush. Some of the things I did wrong when starting out was not prepping the geometry correctly in Maya before bringing into ZBrush. I did not realize that not having some kind of beveling and more than one face on each side of the block was problematic when applying the displacement map to the geometry back in Maya. Then I did not realize that even though I beveled the blocks, when I add more subdivisions in ZBrush, the polygons within the beveled edges get tiny and become a problem when smoothing and laying out UVs afterwards. So I learned the hard way, that you should bring in your initial geometry from Maya into ZBrush, use a deformation tool to smooth, then export out and bring back into Maya, layout the UVs again so there is no stretching, then bring back to ZBrush to apply displacement.
Once I better understood the steps needed to take before starting to sculpt, and also gaining a more comfortable method of actually applying displacement through several kinds of maps, I became more confident and comfortable in making these stairs.
After a taking a break from looking at these stairs for so long, I came to the realization that the individual blocks are too rounded on their corners, and should be much more sharp and jagged. So going into the DreamWorks session I already knew that might be one comment they would give me. But another thing they said was the blocks themselves should be more varied in size, a little more random in the way they are assembled, and not so uniform.
One thing that I came across while researching stairs or steps in ancient ruins was that they are, for the most part, fairly well preserved. So when making these stairs, I'm not sure how far to go with the destruction or how rough I should make them. Dave commented that even though realistically they might be pretty well preserved, I can take some liberties in adding more cracks and roughness to help sell the "ancient ruins" look of this place.
I have a lot to improve on after hearing these comments, and I look forward to advancing on the look of these steps.