keppel posted at 12:23 AM Sun, 30 July 2023 - #4471479

Whilst reading your replies it occurred to me that I might be able to do a series of front ortho renders of the column.  Render, rotate, render, rotate etc, Then take the image sequence and stitch them into one image and use that image to generate, normal and displacement maps for a new mesh.    Thanks again for the help. 

Ooof! Good grief don't do that! Please! I know I said not to discount brute force, but that's not what I meant!

You're far better off baking a projection from one mesh to another mesh, even if you use a basic 24 sided cylinder, than you would be trying to stitch a series of images together. You wouldn't necessarily even need to "flatten" the cylinder after that. UV map it, which will given you a flattened/"unrolled" image when you bake it. Then create a flat plane, that shares the same UV space/image.

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