3D Modelling - Damaged Pillar (First try)

Here I have the high poly model of the damaged pillar I'm creating. Modelling the base mesh for this in Maya wasn't too hard (unfortunately I don't have any screenshots which I'll explain why in my next post) since the mesh was fairly easy to make because its fairly cylindrical, the only part which did cause me a little trouble was the top square part below the actual roof which was hollowed out (looks kinda like a bird house). The reason this was difficult to me was because I didn't know how to hollow to hollow it out evenly and wasn't aware that there was a function in Maya where you could reverse faces (so if a face was facing the wrong way you can flip it the right way since on a poly only one side of the face renders and you would want that to be facing the way its going to be seen, essentially the un-rendered side facing inside the mesh and the rendered side facing outside of the mesh) which came in very useful for this part of the model. I basically made a quarter of the shape adding some parts to the inside then duplicated and rotated it 3 times to create a full shape (making sure I had the rotate tool snapped to 90 degrees so it was evenly rotated), all I had to do then was join up the insides and fill in the missing gaps with the 'fill hole' and 'bridge' tool. This was the base mesh finished.

After I finished the base mesh I exported it to ZBrush so I could create the high poly, shown in the images above. I got the clay brush and set it to remove to create the most damaged parts of the pillar (the ones which would change the silhouette of the pillars shape, which would then need to be cut into my base mesh). Once I created the main damaged parts, I then used a texture setting and applied this weathered looking texture to it to show its been damaged from the actual age of the pillar itself and that this is a really old structure, not a new pillar that just happened to get blown up or broken. After that step all I did was add some finishing touches with with different brushes to create scratches and a crumbling effect in the actual damaged parts of the pillar. Since the pillar itself was done, I had to model the dragon. I modelled the dragon from scratch in ZBrush instead of making a low poly version of it in Maya because it would be much easier to use the ZSpheres tool than to make it in Maya. I started using the ZSpheres to create the rough shape of the dragon, whilst doing this I encountered some problems where every time I thought I was rotating the sphere I was actually adding really small spheres onto it which caused problems when I added the skin to it after, this was a simple fix of just deleting the unnecessary spheres. Now with my pillar and my dragon complete, I exported it back to Maya