Stump(ed)?

A little project I am working on with my College group. I am a environmental/asset artist for this group and on of the first assets I was assigned to do was a stump. I figured I should start with a cylinder(Its what I saw when I blocked out a stump in Photoshop,) then I started moving faces verts and edges. To add a few bumps here and their I decided to do a couple of extrusions and the same thing applied for the exposed roots.

When all was said and done I had the block-out for my stump. From their I went on and applied a turbo smooth. this made it much smoother, but then the cleanup-work had to ensue! After all was said and done I had a pretty nice low poly stump, barley under 200 polys; A huge difference from its 900 polygon counterpart.

Finally, I had to work in Crazy Bump and Photoshop to get the normal's finished, as well as alphas for the tree started. I began in Photoshop and photo-sourced a few images from Google  Then I Created my own variation of about 6 different bark textures, shaders, and clouds. Next crazy bump was used to create the normal map and a tad bit of cleanup work on the normal was done in Photoshop  Finally, I found a few images of ivy on walls and made Targas of them and applied them to the stump to get the final image below.

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