Which maps to bake and workflow?
polycounter lvl 8
Hey this is my first post here, Id like to say hi, and ask a few questions in regards to industry work-flow & texture map baking.
Which Maps?
The first question is what maps to focus on, or what maps are being used for next-gen texturing in a production setting? Aside form the obvious maps like a normal map, or AO, are there any other maps that are commonly used. I stared messing around with the mental ray lighting maps and like some of the results, but I never here anyone talk about about using them. It seems these could save some time in Photoshop, or am I missing something?
The final goal is to have some kind of studio / production level work-flow before I graduate from college and head to the industry. I do good work, but I always get side-tracked wondering if I could be doing things quicker / better. We do have instructors at my college, but there all about 6 years behind in 3d technique so I pretty much gave up on asking them about this kind of work. Anyway, below are a few things I've been having issues with and I'm not sure how to solve them.
Height Map - Every time I bake out a height map in max or Mudbox, it always yields a poor quality grey map where I have to bring it into Photoshop and jack the levels up to get any kind of usable results. (and I use the word usable loosely) Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
What program to bake from? - Out of everything I've tried I tend to lean toward 3ds max, using mental ray. The problem is when I import a mesh from Mudbox and its in that 1-2 million poly range 3ds max becomes almost unusable, or at the very least, the workflow comes to a crawl. The whole point of doing a Hi-Polly sculpt for a game application is to get those beautiful normal and AO maps, and if I can't get good results in a reasonable amount of time it almost becomes pointless. Should I give up on Max for baking, or is there some kind of work-around when it comes to importing in very high poly meshes?
Z-fighting and mental ray - The good is awesome, but the bad is unusable. Mental ray produces great normal maps for me except for the area's where polys overlap each other. Is this caused by z-fighting or am I doing something wrong here too? Odd thing is the AO maps don't suffer from this problem.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Which Maps?
The first question is what maps to focus on, or what maps are being used for next-gen texturing in a production setting? Aside form the obvious maps like a normal map, or AO, are there any other maps that are commonly used. I stared messing around with the mental ray lighting maps and like some of the results, but I never here anyone talk about about using them. It seems these could save some time in Photoshop, or am I missing something?
The final goal is to have some kind of studio / production level work-flow before I graduate from college and head to the industry. I do good work, but I always get side-tracked wondering if I could be doing things quicker / better. We do have instructors at my college, but there all about 6 years behind in 3d technique so I pretty much gave up on asking them about this kind of work. Anyway, below are a few things I've been having issues with and I'm not sure how to solve them.
Height Map - Every time I bake out a height map in max or Mudbox, it always yields a poor quality grey map where I have to bring it into Photoshop and jack the levels up to get any kind of usable results. (and I use the word usable loosely) Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
What program to bake from? - Out of everything I've tried I tend to lean toward 3ds max, using mental ray. The problem is when I import a mesh from Mudbox and its in that 1-2 million poly range 3ds max becomes almost unusable, or at the very least, the workflow comes to a crawl. The whole point of doing a Hi-Polly sculpt for a game application is to get those beautiful normal and AO maps, and if I can't get good results in a reasonable amount of time it almost becomes pointless. Should I give up on Max for baking, or is there some kind of work-around when it comes to importing in very high poly meshes?
Z-fighting and mental ray - The good is awesome, but the bad is unusable. Mental ray produces great normal maps for me except for the area's where polys overlap each other. Is this caused by z-fighting or am I doing something wrong here too? Odd thing is the AO maps don't suffer from this problem.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Replies
You might be interested in searching for 'synched workflow' as different programs will generate different tangent space normal maps, so it's a good idea if you can bake with the same settings as the engine you're going to display the model in.
For height map, you'd probably have to post example pictures for people to look at.
For maps, I'm no expert but the some ones I know of: specular, gloss, curvature, AO, cavity, detail, displacement. Obviously all have different uses, some more specific than others.