Help needed, normal mapping dilemma

snap.crackle.pop

I'm making a normal mapped character and i'm kinda into a dilemma. I don’t really have lots of experience doing normal mapping so I came here to ask a few questions.

My problem consist of projecting a jacket over a torso. I modeled the jacket and i modeled the whole torso





Now should I just leave my Lowpoly torso (naked) and project my Highpoly jacket over it, or should i manage to have lowpoly jacket fit and weld over deleted faces of my Lowpoly torso to fit the general height aspect of the jacket ?



This is confusing, can anyone give me some input over this ?

Thanks a lot.

Joseph Silverman

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Are you asking whether it's worth modeling the extrusion of the jacket or if you should just project everything onto the nude form? No, it can't be that.

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I think it might be, actually.

snap.crackle.pop

"Are you asking whether it's worth modeling the extrusion of the jacket or if you should just project everything onto the nude form? No, it can't be that."


That precisely what im asking, what would people do if you had a character wearing jacket ? model the jacket separately from the body or model the jacket into the body.


-Sorry fellas for this poor phrased question but i don't know what im doing when im making a normal projection. I have no experience whatsoever with this.

fritz

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow.htm

snap.crackle.pop

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow.htm

Thanks but i already saw this, I only have some trouble visualizing how would a piece of cloth be projected over my torso.

raydog

It depends on your lowpoly budget. If it allows you to have a separate geometry for the jacket then by all means you should project it on a separate lowpoly jacket. It's better to have separation from the body, especially for textures. Of course you'll be deleting parts of the body that are hidden inside the jacket as there's no reason to still have them. However, if your limited in terms of polys, you should just project it to the naked body, but you should just move the verts to follow the silhouette of the jacket instead of the body. Keep in mind that when I say lowpoly, your character would be around 1,000 tris or less and by the looks of your model, you would be around 8,000 or more so you definitely could afford to project it to a separate lowpoly mesh for the jacket.

Joseph Silverman

[ QUOTE ]
It depends on your lowpoly budget. If it allows you to have a separate geometry for the jacket then by all means you should project it on a separate lowpoly jacket. It's better to have separation from the body, especially for textures.

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Howso? If the character is always wearing the jacket, and it's essentially skintight (no cloth sim or anything) it makes no sense at all to waste the polies. You can just include it on the lowpoly and render your normals out with the hp jacket on.

raydog

I guess if it's skin tight then you could just project it straight to the body. Just move some verts to follow both the form of the jacket and the body, instead of just the body. You want to suggest in the lowpoly model that it's just not a naked body but a body with a jacket on top of it. And your not really wasting polys by creating a separate geometry for the jacket because your taking those same polys from the body itself. At work, we've made characters that are around 5,000 polys total with three layers of clothing. It's just a matter of optimizing and knowing where to put your polys.

Joseph Silverman

What i'm saying is that http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v396/foozboote/2.jpg looks like the ideal solution. All welded down to one object, efficient for everything except maybe uvs. Having a completely separate jacket seems wasteful and redundant unless you need to cloth sim.

raydog

Sometimes its better to separate it, especially if your using a skin shader. Well, that's just how we do things at work more specifically on next gen characters. It's also good for keeping things modular, for ease in variation.