Animated Normal Maps
polycounter lvl 10
Hello there,
This is a question for 3ds max maninly.
If you made a series of zbrush hipoly models that represented frames of animation; IE:
1. you sculpt a muscle man, lowpoly and hipoly;
2. then sculpt a few more hipoly models or augment your hi poly model several times to represent the tightening of muscles or loosening or melting ect.
3.You then bake all those stages of the hi poly onto the lowpoly, you bake each frame onto the low poly seperately and grab the normal maps off it...
Could you then
4.take that series of normal maps and have them animated / looped - keyframed on the lowpoly model?
how would you do this? would this make it possible to have like animated vines and stuff on your wall textures? and have it appear like the geometry is moving when you havent animated a single vert? Could you also trigger the animated normal maps by proximity triggers in game? hmm well im really looking to do this just for presentation and create different looks with the same base mesh.
This is a question for 3ds max maninly.
If you made a series of zbrush hipoly models that represented frames of animation; IE:
1. you sculpt a muscle man, lowpoly and hipoly;
2. then sculpt a few more hipoly models or augment your hi poly model several times to represent the tightening of muscles or loosening or melting ect.
3.You then bake all those stages of the hi poly onto the lowpoly, you bake each frame onto the low poly seperately and grab the normal maps off it...
Could you then
4.take that series of normal maps and have them animated / looped - keyframed on the lowpoly model?
how would you do this? would this make it possible to have like animated vines and stuff on your wall textures? and have it appear like the geometry is moving when you havent animated a single vert? Could you also trigger the animated normal maps by proximity triggers in game? hmm well im really looking to do this just for presentation and create different looks with the same base mesh.
Replies
Blending can be driven by any number of variables, it just needs a value passed into the shader to determine how much to blend. Animated textures can be used similarily, but require more programming to set up to do more than play at a constant rate.
Professor: can you animate the textures in 3ds max with no programming just for and effect / presentation?
IIRC, the public SDK documentation goes over wrinkle map creation, you might want to check that out.
Also, Uncharted uses normal map rigs on the clothing, very cool effect.
Most definitely, but rendering with 3ds max was the reason I learned to program shaders (I hate it). So you are better off asking someone else.
Thanks everyone for your help, please let me know if you have more information.
http://doc.crymod.com/AssetCreation/frames.html?frmname=topic&frmfile=index.html
above is the link the the main document, if you search "how to create wrinkle maps" in the left side bar you will see the document. you can find me in those pages for the next while...
Thanks again
Microneezia~
Water here uses a looping & tiling animated normal map.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/img/gmts_landscape.html
Also a couple animated heightmaps halfway down this page, which were converted to normal maps at load time since we didn't get around to implementing the displacement part of the demo.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/img/protean_transform.html