Your advice . . .

model the vase, make a nice unwrap and then paint it in photoshop. these paintings are pretty easy to fake, as long as you stay consistent with your brushes. where's your internship btw? i'm sure your employer should/would be able to help you?

Model your high poly mesh in your 3d package and bake an AO and Normal map from that onto your lowpoly mesh. There's no need to bring it into a sculpting program and using crazybump to generate your normals isn't going to be of much use as the painting is flat (has no surface detail.)

Just find a flat painting like the one on the vase and texture it onto your diffuse in photoshop. The only normal information you want is from the vase itself, not the painting. Though I suppose you could do a crazybump pass from your finished diffuse to get small surface detail, then overlay it on top of your baked normals with the blue channel ticked off. But really, especially if you're going for that clean, restored look as per the reference, the baked normal from the sub-d mesh will be more than enough.

Also look into cube maps, could come in handy on a piece like this

I'm not sure where to find them, as I can't seem to locate any that have that classic greek or roman style theme, but I know there are images floating around online of 360 degree photography of actual historical vases. basically they set up a camera and a automated turntable, slowly rotate the vase while snapping photos, then take a slice of each photo and combine them, visually unwrapping the vase evenly.

if you could find one of those, it would be a cool thing to utilize or take reference from. or, like Bunglo suggested, finding a roman painting thats similar and start with that. (that might be alot easier.)

I can't tell which one is your high poly model and which one is the low.

I'm not familiar with Maya nor Xnormal, so I'll give you some general tips for a piece like this. First, try and make the high poly mesh do as much work as it can. If you can get away with having a single face look as though there's a beveled dip in it (such as with the lip of the vase), just use a single face in the low poly. It looks like you've modeled out the lip in it's entirety which isn't necessary, a proper bake of the highpoly will yield the same results with less tris.

Smoothing the lowpoly correctly before you bake is super important. You don't want any unnecessary gradients or artifacts as those will show up in the normal map when you bake. Where there is a "hard edge" in your smoothing (this is assuming correct smoothing setup), break that UV island on that hard edge and separate the two by a few pixels. This will remove any weird black seems that you would get if you kept the island as one piece. Packing your UVs too tight is a bad thing. You need to account for mipping when you're unwrapping a mesh so that when you zoom out from the model, UV islands don't start bleeding into one another. The resolution you're baking at will determine (for the most part) how far away you want each island to be from one another. The idea is that you want the padding from the bake to fill up the gutters (empty space between UV islands). So if you bake at 2048 with a padding of 8 pixels, have your islands 16 pixels apart is a good amount to ensure the padding from each island meets in the middle of the gutter.

Take a look at these links for more info:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80947

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29#Baking

If you make that large cut of the vase thicker (as in, pull the inner faces toward the center of the mesh), it'll be easier to bake and will read better in game. Also, that weird, extruded chunk on the right of the vase makes no sense.

Quote from knj

hmm i was aiming for broken handle look.

Ahhh, it does make sense Adding more of the handle back into the mesh might be better for easier identification. It'll probably add more interest to the silhouette as well.

More tips:

Watch your triangles distribution. Does it really pays off to have the mesh so dense in top left corner? And why is there a edge loop cutting through it? That only doubles the tri-count.

Your UV's are also wrong and too packed. Also, try and avoid wavy lines, everything that looks like this: ) straight it up to make it look like this: |. Otherwise you'll get artifacts when you bake, plus straight UV's will make your life easier when you get to the texturing phase.

Learning as you go is good but don't jump the gun on this one, watch at least a couple of tutorials on baking, I recommend at least this one:

http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autode ... n-3ds-max/ (Yes it's max, but who the fuck cares, it works the same in maya)

first of all: great improvement.

second task: can you post a picture that shows where the artifacts happen on the model and in the uv map and post a picture with a checker board rendered on the vase, to see what if there's any stretching going on?

Assuming there's no stretching, the wavy bakes are common on round objects such as this. To straighten out some of that waviness, adjusting the cage prior to baking can help.

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap#Solving_Wavy_Lines

Again... you are making the same mistakes most people do when they start. Have you watched the tutorial that I posted? It mentions the wavy lines problem and how to fix it.

And yes, check Bunglo's link!

Great work so far, but I think you need to sort out a few things.

I think the cracks are overdone – unless this is a cracked vase that has been reassembled and glued together later. Also, the way they are made right now it looks more like deliberate scratchings over the vase other than actual cracks from broken pieces.

As for the texture itself it looks pretty good, but the cracks really detract from the overall piece.

Also, maybe you could fix some of the round edge normal problems in photoshop?

Keep up the good work!