Modo + Handplane + Knald + Unity. Workflow problem.
polycounter lvl 12
Trying to work out workflow:
- Modo - baking world space normal map.
- Handplane - creating tangent space based on world space from Modo (Unity tangent space)
- Knald - creating rest of the maps... here is the problem.
The normal map I throw to Knald is tangent space which compensates gradients created by using 1 smoothing group. Knald based on this map creates 'wrong' AO since normal is 'wrong'. Any way to make it work ? If Knald would 'eat' world space normal map it should work perfectly.
Any ideas ?
- Modo - baking world space normal map.
- Handplane - creating tangent space based on world space from Modo (Unity tangent space)
- Knald - creating rest of the maps... here is the problem.
The normal map I throw to Knald is tangent space which compensates gradients created by using 1 smoothing group. Knald based on this map creates 'wrong' AO since normal is 'wrong'. Any way to make it work ? If Knald would 'eat' world space normal map it should work perfectly.
Any ideas ?
Replies
You mean compensates on a mesh? In knald certainly it's going to introduce wrong shading.
I don't think knald supports object-space normal maps.
You'll have to make some splits to avoid gradients
in the normal map for knald
even if you finally end up using a mesh with 1 sg.
I've produced a couple of assets with a similar workflow and the AO ended up great.
You can set it's effect to Diffuse Colour and then add a Diffuse Coefficient render output to bake it out.
It can't do a per-vertex distance, only direction.
But we're hoping that next major version (801) has proper cage baking and such.
When is it out by the way? Is there any release schedule?
This http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=83&t=77919.
Basically it's a MODO Kit that lets you do things like harden/soften shading on edges (like you would in Maya) and also has a bunch of normal weighting options (area, angle, full) and has the ability to calculate accurate normals for non-planar polygons (which modo doesn't do by default).
dzbarik:
801? No idea. Modo usually releases at about 1.5 years per major release. So likely somewhere towards the end of next year?
Oh, and to answer your old question MrOneTwo, to see the morph applied at bake time, you'll need to add a morph deformer to your meshes.
Setup Tab > Deformers tab on the left hand form > Morph (from "Apply Mesh Deformer" section). Then you can scale it from 0 - 100% using the Morph Influence item that's created.
Using all your scripts; you are kind of awesome!
There's an extra benefit to this that I've been thinking about:
Have three meshes. High, 'Handplane' and low. Handplane is the low (Must have the same UV's as the low) but with edge loop city. This lets you bake an object space map without gradients, but also with better projections. You can add loops to remove waviness. Then you feed handplane the low mesh with your baked OS map. If you require the low to have shading without gradients then you should be using splits on uv seams or extra loops.
I'd have to say +1 to using modo to bake AO though. As for morph maps, have you tried applying them, baking, then undoing? Can't remember if that works or not.
Baking AO in Modo:
If you use render output you can get pretty nice AO where overlapping geometry gives you black colour on the AO.
If you use material (which is way more better since you can change a lot of things) AO is pretty messy where geometry overlaps and it's white inside.
I hope you know what you mean. Anyway to solve it ?
MrOneTwo:
Not sure about that.
The only way I can think of is to bake both out, but set the Render Output Ambient Occlusion's "Input White Level" to 0.1 - that makes it pretty much binary black/white (i.e. interior areas are black and exterior is white).
Then you can then multiply that over your Occlusion material output in Photoshop.
Have your low poly mesh. Then duplicate it and add edge loops, do not update the shading from vertex map toolkit.In most cases you will have pretty identical looking models. Use edgelooped model for bake, display the normals on your initial model.
Adding lots of work. If only Knald could work on world space normals. Since tangent space maps are relative they will always have some gradients since low poly always compromises on some curves....
Recently people are creating so many awesome apps helping in making your art look as good as it can... and we still pay for making such a mess with normal maps.