Help me bake

[Littlenorwegians]

Right, so I am a bit new to baking. Sculpting high poly models and using normals and speculars of the model on the low poly version.

Right, so here's what I've done.
Now, here's the deal. I want to translate the detail of the high poly one down to the low poly one, right? OK, so how do I go about doing that, is the question. Bit of a newbie, in some regards, so be nice.


I just did some basic stuff with brushes, but it should yield some result, no?

Using 3ds max and Mudbox.

Help me with this and I will love you forever.

 

[CrazyThumbs]

There are quite a few ways to bake normals. Here's a tutorial that I learned alot from, and tend to follow.
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/au...en-weapon-creation-day-1-the-high-poly-model/http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/au...en-weapon-creation-day-1-the-high-poly-model/
It's a 3 parter, so make sure to watch all of it.

Baking tends to be the most frustrating part of modeling now, took me a while to learn.

I also have links to other tutorials, I'll dig through and can post them later if you like.

Edit: There's this tutorial that applies a normal map to a cube in order to turn it into a die. I can't find it right now, but it's great for beginners and is easy to follow along. If you can look for that first

 

[Littlenorwegians]

That'd be lovely. I will go through the video, but it's all done in 3DS Max.

I don't know, since I am a newbie, but if there is a difference between doing all in max and doing some in Max and some in Mudbox.

 

[CrazyThumbs]

If you import the mudbox file into max, you should be able to follow along fine.

 

[Littlenorwegians]

Yay, I got something baked.

It's not much to show, because I just swirled around with brushes just to add detail, but look!!! Detail! On the same poly count.

Man, this was exciting. If you got any more tuts, I will look through them.
There's a lot of different ways to bake, they say, so keep 'em coming and we'll have a huge, baking love-fest, eh?


EDIT: Just another test.
Low poly, baked and high poly, in that order.

 

[Xendance]

Remember that it might not look the same in realtime rendering.
UDK likes the meshes so that your UV islands correspond to the smoothing groups (as in the group of faces that have averaged vertex normals), then you shouldn't get any hard edges or any other oddities in game.

Also for baking I recommend xnormal

 

[Littlenorwegians]

*Like from a 50's infomercial*

Xnormal. Gee, what's that?

 

[OldRavenNL]

google is your friend.

<a href="http://www.xnormal.net" target="_blank">http://www.xnormal.net

I'm not sure what your are using now, but for zbrush or mudbox.. search their forums.. it has tons of examples.

Also try searching in youtube.com .. you will be suprised what you can find there. And seeing someone do it.. is better than reading about it.

One other program I would like everybody to look at is 3dcoat
see http://www.3d-coat.com/

It's really great and has good automatic uv layout and baking tools.

 

[verbii]

http://www.crazybump.com/ is pretty nice too.

 

[Xendance]

http://www.crazybump.com/ is pretty nice too.

Crazybump is used to derive normal maps (plus other too) from diffuse textures, heightmaps or even other normal maps.
It's not a baking software.

 

[Littlenorwegians]

Anyone know of a free product that is similar to PolygonCruncher?

 

[smokeythebear]

xnormal is free and works well. Just look up tutorials on youtube it's pretty simple to use.

 

[Littlenorwegians]

Righto.

I see I missed OldRavenNL's post as well.

Thanks.