Hey,
I'm currently debating an issue I am having here. I am in the process of making a small building for an environment that I am working on:
Here is my question: For buildings, is it worth it to make a high poly version of the building first, then baking it to a low poly?
Or is is best/easier to just use xNormal to generate a normal map from a Grayscale map?

I'm not sure how well I'll be able to replicate a nicely done high poly sculpt of this building: (Note, the following image was a reference, I had no intention of making an exact replica.

I won't be putting in the latticework, but how would I go about sculpting the roof tiles, then matching the diffuse to the roof tiles afterwards? Same goes for the roof tiling on this:

This is why I was considering simply generating a normal map from a grayscale. The results are nice, but for some things, a sculpt just does the job better, don't you think?

Thanks!

You shouldn't sculpt the whole building, If it were for an RTS or something maybe but instead you should build the structure from "legos" you've created.

And please highpoly model it and stay away from generating from grayscale Unless you're a superbadass heightmap painter it always has a certain "look" to it.

Doesn't generating from grayscale work rather well with small wall details like chipped paint and such? I can understand going highpoly for something like ornate pillars, Brick walls, etc. But for stuff that is rather more detailed to sculpt, such as chipped paint, wouldn't grayscale work better so that the diffuse matches the normal map precisely?

It depends, you can use crazybump to help follow the details of the normal map when painting your diffuse. But yes some fine details can be extracted from the diffuse, most textures are a mix of both methods.

Alright, thanks. So basically the best workflow would be: Boxing out building > High Poly/sculpt > Texture?

"Sculpting" buildings isn't exactly the most commonly used method. Think of a building made up of small pieces, or "legos" as Jordan described. You build a badass wall, a badass door, a badass window, an air conditioner, a fire escape, etc. and build your buildings out of those pieces.

This allows you to have a HUGE amount of variation and re-usability with your modular pieces as opposed to trying to sculpt one single building.

Looking at either of your references I could think of any number of modular pieces that could be reused to build variations of either of those buildings.

Sounds good. I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

More on Modularity...
http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryEnvironment#EW