Making ornate engravings
 

I am modeling a lamp and other accessories that have ornate engravings. I was wondering what the best techniques to get these results and how to go about doing such techniques. Toss me in the direction of a tutorial or something; I am lost so absolutely any help would be greatly appreciated.

The project has no poly limit, and I am using a mix of sub d’s polys, and nurbs.
:beer:

The best thing to do there would be to make a displacement map or possibly even just a bump map in an application such as photoshop, or a 3d sculpting program like zbrush or mudbox. Check your help files for info on bump and displacement maps.

Chris

is there anything i can do with curves, or something?

well of course you could model it with curves and lofts or extrudes of nurbs. this kind of object I´d model in polys tho. but like bendingiscool said you could also use zBrsuh. this might be easier since you can just use a hightMap or just z-paint it ZB and export a higer resolution geometry from zBrush into maya.

nurbs modeling might be a mess here.. at least for me.

ok, thanks for the help guys :beer:

i would suggest just bump mapping it or using displacement map because It'll be save you a lot time and probably give you the same/simlar result as if you were to actually model those details using nurbs or poly.