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Autodesk owns a huge monopoly of 3D software. (More than 40 different softwares) [including ones they've purchased, then discontinued]
Maya and 3DS Max is both great options for your 3D pipeline. These are not the only viable softwares, but they're ones I'm most familiar with.
You'll also need Photoshop.
Also advisable is a Normal Map creation software. Xnormal is free, and fantastic. Don't expect much UI or handholding though.
Feel free to shoot me a message if you need any more advice on how to get started. Once you get UE4 up and running, you'll find you can do an awful lot using Epic's starter content and the inbuilt Blueprints.
Hard to say without knowing the physical size of the object in-game; larger objects can afford more detail. Bear in mind, though, that the dragon's model filesize is inflated a bit because the model has extra skeleton nodes and rigging data.
Perhaps a tri count and a screenshot of the mesh in your 3D editor might make it easier to judge? Untextured with edges visible, but not a wireframe.
If you do need to simplify your coral down, I understand xNormal can compute a normal map for a low-poly mesh given it's high-poly equivalent. If you have additional normals to apply, it's not hard to blend two maps (for surface detail, I use GIMP Color To Alpha, IIRC on color #8080FF).
Well, describing it all would be very long.
But to make a short version : I first make a very high poly model (completely unusable in game, usually multiple million polys) in T pose.
Then I make a low poly version using the HP as a reference. I deploy UVs for the LP and extract normals, occlusion and splat map using Xnormals (it's free, and one of the best texture baker out there).
I finally use the baked texture as ground to make the actual textures, and finally rig the LP model from its Tpose.
I hop it helps! :-)
> most high to low workflow videos involve getting lower resolution geometry using decimation master
I guess I'm a bit confused by this part. What is it about Decimation master that you don't like? This is my main zBrush workflow for getting a working low-poly version of my mesh.
For normal maps, I love using xNormal. It's an open source software where you plug in the low and high poly meshes and it generates an awesome normal map to use on the low poly.
Very quick and easy tutorial for render to texture. Good job.
I would, personally, recommend that people use xNormal, however. It's faster, more precise, very versatile, and allows you to render tanget vs. object spaced normals. I would especially recommend this for high poly models that are a million+ verts, as Max's viewport can really bog down with too many verts displayed.
Quite a few applications now support baking from geometry.
Substance designer supports this. 3DS Max supports it. Blender supports it. Mudbox supports it. Zbrush supports it.
Although I don't use Maya a quick google search says Maya supports it..
In some cases you have to bake the geometry on to a plane rather than the highpoly > lowpoly projection baking.
If you don't want to use any of those try Xnormal its free and works very well.
After that you have your 'bitmap converted to a material" options such as:
NVidia Photoshop Filter (free) CrazyBump Mindtex Substance Designer NDo Bitmap2Material
I'm sure there are others.
Finally I've heard there are people who can do it by hand .. they paint the 3 separate colored channels by hand ? I call this crazy talk but if your the type .. its interesting information :-)
http://zbrushcore.com/features says it lacks texture map support, but should have basic polypainting. If you export a sculpt with polypaint turned on, then the vertex color data should be saved to the OBJ (it does in zbrush anyway, not sure if Core is the same). This vertex color data isn't actually a standard part of the OBJ file format so not every program will be able to read it. Xnormal can however, and you can use this tool to bake the polypaint (and other details) from the sculpt to texture maps for a lowpoly UV'd mesh (you might need to use another tool to do the UVs, there are some free ones available as well like Roadkill, Blender, etc).
Have you ever heard of xNormal? It's free and it bakes all sorts of maps, including vertex color. You'll need your high poly and low poly to be .obj though. (If you're using a Mac, disregard this entire comment, because xNormal is only available on Windows.)
As long as you have a low poly with UVs (in 0-1 space of course) that has the same x,y,z coordinates as your high poly, you should be good to go.
xNormal is super easy to use. Here's the website, and here's a beginner's tutorial.
Stick with that pre-integrated skin shader. Generating the maps isn't too difficult with the right tools: you want Xnormal. Plug in your low poly and high poly models (or just the low poly one twice if you don't mind a little loss in detail) and set it to output a depth map and it'll calculate and render one for you.
>xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps.
it doesn't create 4 shadow maps like he suggests. I just thought I should bring it up because normal maps reminded me of this program.
Anyways modern games tend to use Deffered shading
Dono if you're interested but here's a wiki link
xNormal is great, free and is a well featured app to convert b/w height to normal maps and many other useful things. It's basically industry standard at this point despite having an interface that make me want to shoot myself. It has a photoshop plugin too.
It will also bake a matching high res surface into a normal maps for a corresponding low res surface. This is a common thing for games, but I use it quite often in broadcast tv work for making speciallty normal maps. Maya can do this as well with the transfer maps tool, but is slower and generally a pain to use.
Crazybump is another one that can convert photos to normal maps and other map types as well.
Generally both of these, especially xNormal have replaced the nvidia plug-in. I've not really heard of anyone using it except when someone finds a really old tutorial.
The last thing that I'll add, is that unless you specifically know that you need a normal map, i.e games of some other reason such as exporting maps from zbrush, then a bump map is going to work just fine under most circumstances and renderers and really isn't going to be some magic ticket to awesomeness like a lot of people think.
I really appreciate the feedback, il follow and bookmark your blog as well! I am rather new to the high poly to the low poly bake actually. I should touch up on that in my next post now that I think of it.
I did a mentorship with one of the artists who was a lead on planetside and did some contract work for cs:go, and learned a bit from that. If you notice most tutorials and write ups encourage to use your high poly and break that down to low poly, however he told me to spend a good amount of time getting a really good low poly mesh and keep a file for that set aside to bake to opposed to breaking down the high poly, just helps speed up the workflow I found.
I am not sure if you have herd of it but theres a great free program adopted by many professionals called xNormal. Wont cost you a cent and makes the whole process much easier to manage. If you do your texture work in photoshop I would also recommend looking into the quixel suite. It is a paid program however it is not too hefty in price. It helps a ton for all your maps and makes making normal maps cake if you dont want to use zbrush for the particular model. You can find free copies out there easily of course if you plan to test it or mess around.
you can find xNormal here http://www.xnormal.net/ and quixel here http://quixel.se (il leave you to hunt the unpaid stuff out of respect to the developers of the software but its not hard to find)
Both are widely adopted and I was referred to them by my mentor.
When I do my bakes to those ships you saw il be sure to write down my process, hopefully by next week.
I actually really enjoyed your write up on taking a game dev class, very informative and well presented. Il pass this along to my programmer as well.
Keep up the great work man, and id always be interested in helping promote any projects you have in the future. Feel free to drop an email anytime.
I'm a big fan of Xnormal for baking.
I find it quicker to export to Xnormal, in the long run.
Be warned though, it's pretty picky with it's geometry. If you've got any nGons, it'll reject the model. Overall though, the quality and control of the output (IMO) tends to be much better than in Maya.
A simple method for getting a good base for texturing basic low poly non-organic models without requiring ZBrush to sculpt a high poly, is to make a copy of the object and model in a few additional details (for timber, maybe some splits/cracks, knot holes, worn/rounded edges, bolts/screws, etc.) then use that with whatever your app's version of subdivision surfaces are (subD, TurboSmooth, HyperNURBs, etc.) to create a high poly version. Export the original and high poly models as OBJs, import them into xNormal and bake out an Ambient Occlusion map. You can then take the AO and overlay it in Photoshop to give some more depth to your textures. You can also bake out other maps like tangent and object space normals, cavity maps, etc.
You can bake in cycles now in the render tab but you can't (to my knowledge) bake normal maps right from cycles. However if you take your baked diffuse color map and put it into something like xnormal you can generate normal maps. So essentially yes! You can use your cool procedural textures but you need to do some finaggling.
To bake in cycles you need to make a new texture (call it "bake" or something like that) in the UV editor and put an image texture node in your material node editor set to that texture. From there pick whichever you want to bake from the bake tab and voila! Then put that image into xnormal or a similar program and you can generate normal maps that way.
Blender basically creates normal maps on the fly from grayscale bump/displacement maps but they use normal object space instead of tangent space (I think...) so if you set a procedural bump node into the color node you'll see some wacky normal colors (object space normal colors) and if you bake them they might be usable but you need to set them to object space as opposed to tangent space.
Here's a blend file that has some baky type stuff you can play around with:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/30365
Disclaimer- I don't really know what I'm talking about but hope this blend file kind of illustrates what I mean. If you find out any cool ways to generate tangent space normal maps let me know!
Edit: Since the image didn't save in that file, if you plug the bump node into the color node you can bake that as a diffuse and then plug that result into the normal node to see a baked normal, but it's a really funky baked normal in that it uses object space normal mapping and I don't know how that would work in the Source engine or if you could even use it.
Apologies if this is unintelligible or incoherent :P
xNormal and MapZoneEditor. Both free and powerful, from what I've read.
I'm a newbie and don't have experience with either of them, but intend to.
CrazyBump is probably the most popular one, but it doesn't come free.
I would add xNormal for baking Ambient Occlusion and other types of useful maps for a model. You can even create high detail normal maps if you have a high poly and low poly...
Yup. Generating a subsurface map requires actual geometry to measure the thickness of various parts of a model; with the textures alone (diffuse, specular, etc) that's impossible as they don't contain that sort of data.
I don't actually recommend using the ambient occlusion bake for this, though: it's a very poor representation of the data you need, as it visualises surface proximity and ambient light coverage rather than anything approximating thickness. Instead, I recommend downloading Xnormal and using its baking features to create a proper thickness map. You'll need to export your model as an FBX, OBJ, or Collada file and you'll need to read the manual for it but it's reasonably quick and pretty straightforward for anyone with even a basic knowledge of Blender.
Alternatively, just use xNormal, it's used quite a lot in the industry and is free. Then you don't need to spend time re-projecting, and you get a better normal map than ZBrush gives you.
>Then you light the gun in Substance Designer and bake those little details + light into texture.
Does that work similarly to baking from a hi poly to a low poly in xnormal?
In Xnormal I can easily bake normal map from a messy sculpted multi-million poly model onto a neatly topologized and unwrapped low poly.
So I'm wondering if Substance is similar in that way?
> So, are you taking about creating a higher-poly mesh to use as a base to recalculate the normal map?
That's the idea yea. Basically you take the low poly mesh and subdivide it a bunch of times. And then sculpt it or apply other detail from in the form of a displacement map (normal map can be converted to be a displacement map). I use 3DS Max or Zbrush for this. Then you save the high poly and use something like Xnormal to bake the high poly on to the low poly. Hopefully that gives you some hint as where to start.
Don't forget about 3D Coat, Mudbox, and Zbrush for texturing too. 3D Coat's probably the strongest of the three for realistic-style textures (and shines the most when combined with a 2d bitmap editor like Krita or Photoshop), although the others can be quite useful especially if you already need to license them for sculpting. Out of them all I think I like Mari the best because it's relatively straightforward to put your game shaders into its viewport which makes it easier to see the effects your textures are having, making it the most flexible option to cover a variety of art directions, but if you're strapped for cash it's not an option and it's not as quick as Substance Designer for non-hero assets.
I hope you are planning to cover Knald and Mightybake as well as their free cousin xNormal. These paid bakers aren't worth it for everyone but they can really get results quickly if you have a fast GPU.
Try switching to Blender Internal render just for the nomals, cycles tends to be a little iffy at times. Alternatively, you can create pretty good normals with a program named xNormal. The interface is a little horrible but it gives really good results. Normals seem fine from the image, if they were flipped you would see a clear black shading along the affected faces.
Well there's not one tool. Theres a lot that does it! In fact, the most popular one even in the AAA Industry is Xnormal, which is completely free! 3D modeling programs usually come with something that can bake them too (I know 3DS Max, Maya, and blender can do it), but they usually tend to come out subpar compared to xNormal.
And no, it calculates the actual geometry, not the UVs. Which means you don't need to UV the high-poly (thank goodness). But the low poly DOES need to be UV'd.
xNormal - great for baking ambient occlusion, normal, cavity, bump, and tons of other kinds of textures to make your models and modeling workflow really stand out, for free.
Beats the crap out of baking directly in Blender or Maya or Max, IMO, because in my tests, a normal map bake at 4096 by 4096 takes ~20 minutes in Maya (for a standard human character, from 40,000 to 5000 tris) vs. 30 seconds in xNormal.
I think you should download xNormal, it is totally free, faster than max at rendering to texture, and gives an option to create many more texture types like cavity, AO, etc... It is a lot simpler to setup than 3dsmax's render to texture dialog.
http://www.xnormal.net/downloads.aspx
This is a great tutorial video showing the methodology to get quality bakes, it helped me a lot with understanding how I was creating anomalies in my textures.
If you download xnormal, there will be lots of settings to adjust rays, their distance, threshold, etc. Baking with cage explicitly says that rays are being cast through vertices.
http://www.xnormal.net/Tutorials.aspx
its all about rays ^^
I'm learning about this myself, i've been told to learn a program called XNormal XNormal . With that program you load up the high poly mesh, and the low poly mesh, and it will then bake out the normal map to a texture. the program seams to do other stuff as well, but so far thats all I've used it for.
What is with this fad of people setting all their smoothing groups to 1? You're not supposed to do that. Your smoothing groups also come into play when you bake your normal maps so you want the breaks in the smoothing groups to follow the same as your texture seams.
As for the model it needs it's smoothing groups redoing and then rebaking, take time getting a good cage or perhaps look into using xNormal - http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx
Also I think the green channel is inverted on what you currently have.
Do it! There's really not much to it! Do you have adobe illustrator? If you make the graphic somehow you can put it into something like xnormal and get something pretty fast. You can make a simple cylinder look exquisite from textures alone; spec map, bump/normal map, texture map, emission map. Play around in the source film maker to see how you can use different images plugged into different places, that's where most of the effort should go IMO. Just dig in, do some looking online, and before you know it you'll be on your way and know all about it :P
-feel free to ask if you had any questions, but some looking around will help you a lot!
If ambient occlusion is what youre trying to accomplish, you can use xnormal to bake it out. Its free. http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx
Tutorial for AO http://www.donaldphan.com/tutorials/xnormal/xnormal_occ.html
> I'm not sure if wings 3d has this, but it's a standard among 3D Software.
He could just use xNormal - It's free, very good at this sort of thing and I use it at work all the time.