Does anybody know of a good tutorial for baking normals in Maya. A tutorial that shows the high detail being baked onto the actual model. Not just a plane like most tuts I've seen does.
I've been manually creating the Normals in Photoshop and it takes longer. It's my biggest hold up at the moment. I have a 32bit system so XN is not an option either. Any help is appreciated.:)
Got some more work done on the scene, I've finished off a few more assets like light fixtures, cables and girders and what not. Still not quite finished yet, I still got some more stuff to model for this, and get it animated so I make a fly through around the room. I've tried my best not to over do anything, please tell me if something looks glaringly bad, I'll fix it up immediately. Any feedback or critiques are very welcome to help me improve this scene further. If you guys wanna ask anything too, ask away!
That's amazing... That's in Cryengine 3 right?
How did you organize the files and everything? I've been trying to get my stuff into cryengine but it's SO annoyingly impractical (at least from my point of view).
I have all my work in one folder (yes backed up too, obviously) but cryengine requires some files to be in a subdirectory of the cryengine directory...
Soon after it all gets so incredibly messy and unorganized... Especially when taking into account that cryengine requires everything to be its own format, from collision all the way to shader types in the 3ds max material editor.
How do you organize everything so that it's manageable when you have dozens of separate objects to import. It would take me forever!
not sure how close you're trying to get it to the concept but the thing that stands out most for me is the lighting is quite different in yours (very yellow overall) and could be improved some i think. maybe play around and add some red lights in for the screens and some blueish lights for contrast. I think that'll help get yours closer to the concept.
also your ceiling lights are quite strong where as i don't even think the ceiling lights in the concept are switched on.
as for the modelling i think everything looks great!!
one thing you could add are some holographics planes on the main table like in the concept.
looks good though, keep it up! see you at work slacker
Got some more work done on the scene, I've finished off a few more assets like light fixtures, cables and girders and what not. Still not quite finished yet, I still got some more stuff to model for this, and get it animated so I make a fly through around the room. I've tried my best not to over do anything, please tell me if something looks glaringly bad, I'll fix it up immediately. Any feedback or critiques are very welcome to help me improve this scene further. If you guys wanna ask anything too, ask away!
Really nice work! you work really quickly which is something I need to work on . Could you show what you did for your tiles? (the layout) Any tips for how to know what size your tiles should be etc? also would you consider this part to have a unique UV template? or have you used those tiles elsewhere in the scene also
So most of those where the ones which I have textured and some which I haven't. But I am almost finished the floor, walls, and ceiling.
I also spent alot of time trying to figure out my UDK problems and I think I figured them out. So hopefully I will not as much trouble with it.
I also did a few things differently then in the concept. Its some other stuff I have seen in Deus Ex which I wanted to try.
Though I have had a small problem with UDK with this texture and I am not sure why. Its a square texture and I know that it is tiling from photoshop yet in UDK it doesn't want to tile? Mipmapping? I am not sure.
I feel like I am a bit behind at the half way point, but good news is I will be getting alot more time to work on this. The reason being is I was not rehired after my 6th month internship doing 3d modeling for a simulation company here in Baltimore. So I am going to be looking for work. Again. But at least I have "6 month experience" even if its not in gaming.
So yea tell me what you think and I'll get back to texturing.
@VVCephei - Thanks man! Don't worry, initially I thought CryEngine's management system was confusing too, but eventually you get the hang of it. Don't quote me on this because I'm hardly an expert but I think essentially all your cgfs or meshes need to go into the objects folder in order to work. It's better if you put your crytiffs in your textures folder for organizations sake, and your materials in the material folder. Just try and organize it in a way that makes sense, like sorting them like the door folder parented into the props folder or the walls folder parented into the environment folder. Just general organization, it helps when you have to work with others.
@Illusive - Bahaha, thanks man! Yeah, the lights are maybe a bit bright, I'll tone it down and I'll play around with the lighting a little more. Also gotta get those holograms in!
@uberphoenix - Thank you The tiles should just be on the first page, it's just a modular texture sheet that I cut up and placed around the room. You can use the grid to get everything snapping to the scene and lining up nicely if you get the measurements right. There's a underlying white parchment floor to fake the markings too. Along with this are decals in order to get those details in and so it's easy to place them around. I think I could have planned this loads better if I did it again in terms of measurements and more blocking out, but I managed to make it look somewhat cohesive.
Rhaaa, I am in the middle of moving back to my country, no Internet for a week, I guess I won't be able to finish in time... But I will finish the scene sooner or later! Anyway good work everyone, this is progressing really well !
Finally got my modular components all fitting together nicely. Begun (very!) preliminary textures and placing things in UDK.
and my prelim texture map:
Plan is to sculpt details in once i get everything uv'd the way I want. Essentially following a dumbed down version of Snefer's Workflow using a single texture map.
Though I'll likely use a second map for decals and dirt...
Just thought I'd share with you folks the good news and tell that I got featured by Crytek's website! I made a video and some additional screenshots and such for it, here's a link to both below. Sorry guys for the quality of the video, I'm still getting the hang of editing software and trying to figure out how to get good quality and not ridiculously large video files that aren't 14gs. I still gotta figure out the kinks of Sony Vegas. :P
Just thought I'd share with you folks the good news and tell that I got featured by Crytek's website! I made a video and some additional screenshots and such for it, here's a link to both below. Sorry guys for the quality of the video, I'm still getting the hang of editing software and trying to figure out how to get good quality and not ridiculously large video files that aren't 14gs. I still gotta figure out the kinks of Sony Vegas. :P
It would be really awesome if you added some moving elements in there. Maybe make some of those holograms have animation, maybe an arm that has a monitor on it that swivels periodically, or possible some lights that flash.
I'm having a bit of an issue with my Normal bakes and smoothing groups, hopefully somebody here can help me.
Before I projected the bake, I made the low poly all 1 smoothing group, I had 3 polygons in the low poly to increase the overall quality of the bake in hopes that I could just remove the edge loops later.
however when I remove the edge loops after the bake, it severely distorts the smoothing/normal map.
@VVCephei: No, you cannot delete those edges after your bake. Your bake is made specially to work with those edges. The lowpoly you use for the bake has to have the same edges and same smoothing groups as the one you will use in-game with the baked normal map.
(Basically when rendering it will use a combination of the normals of the geometry and the normals from the texture. If the mesh use only one smoothing group it has to compensate the the big difference between the normals of the high and the lowpoly. when you start deleting edges, the normals on the geometry is not the same as before and the texture will over/under compensate the normal value.)
In this situation there are several options:
-You can really bevel the edge there, this will bring a higher polycount.
-I am not sure (with this camera angle) but it might just work like that without the extra edge loops you created.
-You can make a hard edge there (different smoothing groups for the sides), and bake using a cage. (with this solution don't forget that you might have to separate uv shells along those edges)
I suppose it doesn't do much good to participate in the challenge and not also in the thread. Oops
Since last we spoke, I've been chugging away on my Hi-Polies. Finished up all the big assets, and I'll probably be working on some smaller detail stuff over the next couple days (door, rafters, miscellaneous dangling cables and conduits, floor tiles et cetera) before I start to build out low-poly models. Material assignments are rough indications of what's what (Lambert1: Metal, red Blinn: Emissive screens/holographic, Transparent Blue Phong: Glass). Planning to try and preserve those assignments when I get to Low-Poly; shouldn't be too expensive if I do it right.
Does anybody know of a good tutorial for baking normals in Maya. A tutorial that shows the high detail being baked onto the actual model. Not just a plane like most tuts I've seen does.
You're going to want to use Lighting -> Transfer Maps. I don't think I have access to the tutorial I got early in my college career, but I'll take a look and see what I can find.
A couple tips on Transfer Maps
1. It takes a long time. My computer's pretty decent, and the ones we were using at school were very nice, and Transfer Maps still gave us a buttload of down time. When I couldn't figure out why xNormal was bugging out on one of my models, and I had to resort to Transfer Maps, I basically got a free coffee break at the cheap coffee place across the street instead of the expensive Starbucks in the lobby.
2. If you're baking AO as well as Normals, you'll need to change the output settings on both. It took me forever to figure out why TM was outputting Normal Map at the resolution I wanted but making only a 256x256 AO map. I think Normal comes from the Maya Common Output and AO comes from the Mental Ray Output, so you'll need to update your output settings on both of those options.
I did try to fight with the Transfer Map tool, but in the end I just went back to xNormal, so much easier ans faster. Just a checkbox to get good AO and normals.
Oh boy , recently I been struggling to have space in my schedule to complete the scene in a month, but it doesn't look its happening , I will still upload as far as I can go.
I kinda feel bad because I don't like the idea of unfinished projects , and in my mind it was already a commitment to finish it.
Here is another highpoly its the console behind the war table.
Oh and congratulations to lukepham101 you sir rock.
@rockguy - Thanks so much, you rock too. Please get this scene finished, those high polys look fantastic! It'd a super shame if it never got finished, I'm definitely keeping up to date and want to see more!
@ZeroStrike & AlexCatMasterSupreme - Thanks guys, the crits are welcome too, thank you! I'll be sure to put some more movement and life into the scene with some more stuff, needs some flashing party lights up in there boiii!
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone here on Polycount, you guys are a fantastic community and as one of my first pieces I've posted here, you guys have been super helpful. Everyone's work on here is grooving, and it's awesome to see so much progress on this thread it's great, keep it up guys! Again, I just want to say you guys are awesome, stay classy Polycount!
Man, I love Sci-Fi scenes, but there's something about futuristic doors that just sloooooooows me down. I just can't visualize a door in the future for some reason. Eventually, got something passable, close enough to the concept for now.
And just for kicks, the major Hi-Poly assets all arranged in approximately the concept's layout:
Hey Esselle, Your is not half bad. It's a really good start. Just keep going and keep practicing. You will get there in time. I know I'm not that good. I still need alot of work, you just need to keep going, learning, taking crit, and practicing.
Try to finish this month challenge even if you didn't finish on time. Just keep going until you are finished. I want to see yours at a more finished state. I know that is what I am going to do even if I don't finish on time.
@Tonysladky: thanks for the reply. I have messed with transfer maps before but the bake seems to always come out wonky. Thanks for the vid, it did help clear up some setting options I had checked wrong.
Unfortunately It looks like I can't complete this on time either. I did learn some new concepts of module design though. It's so hard finding a good solid workflow because their are so many options and each one seems to fail at one point or another. For example Zbrush makes great detail but increases polys by too much. Xnormal only works on 64 bit systems and Maya bakes awkwardly. An artist can only do so much with photoshop and it takes forever.
Anyway enough complaining lol here is my low poly modules so far using just Photoshop for normals.
Animesh, xnormal runs on 32bit systems, in fact i run it on 32bit vista and it just warns me for memory usage sometimes
My progress:
I got some issues on the floor, seem the same who ng.aniki had too, tomorrow i will spent some time on that.
Any of you guys have some tricks for lightmaps? I know that charts had to be in 0-1 uv space and not overlayed, but when is a good idea to split islands? Is this the same rules as normal uvs (splitted on hard edges, continuous on soft ones)?
I am going to be going through the same questions myself about lightmass and specular/specular power.
By the way. The lighting is starting to look nice.
I am also probably not going to technically make the challenge for a month. It maybe like a month and a few days. I am working hard to finish up the last few things. I will continue on with this until it is finished cause I want this for a portfolio piece. I will post my work here even after the contest is technically over.
Found the challenge last week just days before I got super busy and couldn't participate. So I tried. On a tiny time budget I was able to get some work done.
I hopefully can mess with some nDo and dDo today and clean up those tiles.
Here is my latest progress. No way would I call this even being close to finished. I did however learn a lot with the scene. I learned I need to find a faster pipeline. I need to better understand modules and I really need to fine tune and figure out a solid pipeline for making normals. I feel Maya really lacks when it come to that. Anyway it was fun but I don't think this is worth spending anymore time on. I learned and now I'm moving on to make something without so many mistakes. Good Luck to the rest of you
Dude ng.aniki that is Great! Do you use a reflection mask on that glass and how did you get the glass for the top to work. Did you have it as multiple materials/pieces or just one?
Hey! I just wanted to pop my head in and show off my early WIP. I got started on this one a little late obviously, but I plan on finishing it before moving onto next month's challenge. I am on vacation for another week and a half, so I should have a decent chunk of time!
This is my first time tackling Cryengine. So far I love the Max integration, but like any other program, I'm stumbling through it at points.
Dude ng.aniki that is Great! Do you use a reflection mask on that glass and how did you get the glass for the top to work. Did you have it as multiple materials/pieces or just one?
I used a different material, this is the lighter way I think. The bottom part is basic opaque shader with a reflection mask for the screen and some other parts, and the top glass material is an additive - Unlit shader. Additive blending is the cheapest to have a translucent-looking material.
With only one material, this would have required a blend_translucent shader (> Expensive, especially if you have multiple layers), for the whole static mesh (>More expensive) and also an addition alpha-blend texture. It cost an additionnal draw call for the static mesh but I think it is worth the price.
God, aniki and atlus, your works are great... some chance to see textures? or just specular maps?
Actually for the last piece I was a bit lazy and had used all the alpha channel of my diffuse and normal map texture, so I used the diffuse texture as specular. In the material editor I made the texture power 2 (to add contrast) and multiplied it by a high value to make it stronger.
The result is not the best (especially because darker part will have really softer specular, which is not always the best fit, and you can't make some other details pop with more dirt in the specular. So the specular effect is a bit poor), but it is really fast and time saving.
God, aniki and atlus, your works are great... some chance to see textures? or just specular maps?
Thanks!
I can show off some spec maps... they aren't anything crazy though :P
I generally just get my diffuse done, then copy it, de-saturate it, move around the levels until there is decent contrast with the most mid-tone value on the texture, then alter the base colors of the other materials until they look good :P
I'm not even close to finishing mine yet but I think I'm going to stick with it as I seem to be learning lots from this concept (basically failing a lot, fixing the problems and trying not to do them again ^_^').
Replies
I've been manually creating the Normals in Photoshop and it takes longer. It's my biggest hold up at the moment. I have a 32bit system so XN is not an option either. Any help is appreciated.:)
Ah right I see, thanks for that
wires of the scene
#1
#2
#3
#4
Hah, they probably just used the same reference image and placed it on a greenscreen.
Got some more work done on the scene, I've finished off a few more assets like light fixtures, cables and girders and what not. Still not quite finished yet, I still got some more stuff to model for this, and get it animated so I make a fly through around the room. I've tried my best not to over do anything, please tell me if something looks glaringly bad, I'll fix it up immediately. Any feedback or critiques are very welcome to help me improve this scene further.
That's amazing... That's in Cryengine 3 right?
How did you organize the files and everything? I've been trying to get my stuff into cryengine but it's SO annoyingly impractical (at least from my point of view).
I have all my work in one folder (yes backed up too, obviously) but cryengine requires some files to be in a subdirectory of the cryengine directory...
Soon after it all gets so incredibly messy and unorganized... Especially when taking into account that cryengine requires everything to be its own format, from collision all the way to shader types in the 3ds max material editor.
How do you organize everything so that it's manageable when you have dozens of separate objects to import. It would take me forever!
not sure how close you're trying to get it to the concept but the thing that stands out most for me is the lighting is quite different in yours (very yellow overall) and could be improved some i think. maybe play around and add some red lights in for the screens and some blueish lights for contrast. I think that'll help get yours closer to the concept.
also your ceiling lights are quite strong where as i don't even think the ceiling lights in the concept are switched on.
as for the modelling i think everything looks great!!
one thing you could add are some holographics planes on the main table like in the concept.
looks good though, keep it up! see you at work slacker
Damn Dude, nice!
Really nice work! you work really quickly which is something I need to work on
Thanks in advance!
So most of those where the ones which I have textured and some which I haven't. But I am almost finished the floor, walls, and ceiling.
I also spent alot of time trying to figure out my UDK problems and I think I figured them out. So hopefully I will not as much trouble with it.
I also did a few things differently then in the concept. Its some other stuff I have seen in Deus Ex which I wanted to try.
Though I have had a small problem with UDK with this texture and I am not sure why. Its a square texture and I know that it is tiling from photoshop yet in UDK it doesn't want to tile? Mipmapping? I am not sure.
I feel like I am a bit behind at the half way point, but good news is I will be getting alot more time to work on this. The reason being is I was not rehired after my 6th month internship doing 3d modeling for a simulation company here in Baltimore. So I am going to be looking for work. Again. But at least I have "6 month experience" even if its not in gaming.
So yea tell me what you think and I'll get back to texturing.
Thanks.
@Illusive - Bahaha, thanks man! Yeah, the lights are maybe a bit bright, I'll tone it down and I'll play around with the lighting a little more. Also gotta get those holograms in!
@AlexCatMasterSupreme - Thanks bro! Still getting there though.
@uberphoenix - Thank you
and my prelim texture map:
Plan is to sculpt details in once i get everything uv'd the way I want. Essentially following a dumbed down version of Snefer's Workflow using a single texture map.
Though I'll likely use a second map for decals and dirt...
Crits very welcome as always!
Just thought I'd share with you folks the good news and tell that I got featured by Crytek's website!
http://www.crydev.net/newspage.php?news=107825
[ame="
It would be really awesome if you added some moving elements in there. Maybe make some of those holograms have animation, maybe an arm that has a monitor on it that swivels periodically, or possible some lights that flash.
So here is my next update for the weekend. I need to keep pushing. But things are coming together.
Before I projected the bake, I made the low poly all 1 smoothing group, I had 3 polygons in the low poly to increase the overall quality of the bake in hopes that I could just remove the edge loops later.
however when I remove the edge loops after the bake, it severely distorts the smoothing/normal map.
After the edge removal:
(Basically when rendering it will use a combination of the normals of the geometry and the normals from the texture. If the mesh use only one smoothing group it has to compensate the the big difference between the normals of the high and the lowpoly. when you start deleting edges, the normals on the geometry is not the same as before and the texture will over/under compensate the normal value.)
In this situation there are several options:
-You can really bevel the edge there, this will bring a higher polycount.
-I am not sure (with this camera angle) but it might just work like that without the extra edge loops you created.
-You can make a hard edge there (different smoothing groups for the sides), and bake using a cage. (with this solution don't forget that you might have to separate uv shells along those edges)
Since last we spoke, I've been chugging away on my Hi-Polies. Finished up all the big assets, and I'll probably be working on some smaller detail stuff over the next couple days (door, rafters, miscellaneous dangling cables and conduits, floor tiles et cetera) before I start to build out low-poly models. Material assignments are rough indications of what's what (Lambert1: Metal, red Blinn: Emissive screens/holographic, Transparent Blue Phong: Glass). Planning to try and preserve those assignments when I get to Low-Poly; shouldn't be too expensive if I do it right.
You're going to want to use Lighting -> Transfer Maps. I don't think I have access to the tutorial I got early in my college career, but I'll take a look and see what I can find.
A couple tips on Transfer Maps
1. It takes a long time. My computer's pretty decent, and the ones we were using at school were very nice, and Transfer Maps still gave us a buttload of down time. When I couldn't figure out why xNormal was bugging out on one of my models, and I had to resort to Transfer Maps, I basically got a free coffee break at the cheap coffee place across the street instead of the expensive Starbucks in the lobby.
2. If you're baking AO as well as Normals, you'll need to change the output settings on both. It took me forever to figure out why TM was outputting Normal Map at the resolution I wanted but making only a 256x256 AO map. I think Normal comes from the Maya Common Output and AO comes from the Mental Ray Output, so you'll need to update your output settings on both of those options.
This looks like a good basic tutorial for Transfer Maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYWj3zGXSjM
I kinda feel bad because I don't like the idea of unfinished projects , and in my mind it was already a commitment to finish it.
Here is another highpoly its the console behind the war table.
Oh and congratulations to lukepham101 you sir rock.
@ZeroStrike & AlexCatMasterSupreme - Thanks guys, the crits are welcome too, thank you! I'll be sure to put some more movement and life into the scene with some more stuff, needs some flashing party lights up in there boiii!
I just wanted to say thank you to everyone here on Polycount, you guys are a fantastic community and as one of my first pieces I've posted here, you guys have been super helpful.
And just for kicks, the major Hi-Poly assets all arranged in approximately the concept's layout:
anyway, this is my progress
Try to finish this month challenge even if you didn't finish on time. Just keep going until you are finished. I want to see yours at a more finished state. I know that is what I am going to do even if I don't finish on time.
Marmoset:
Anyway enough complaining lol here is my low poly modules so far using just Photoshop for normals.
My progress:
I got some issues on the floor, seem the same who ng.aniki had too, tomorrow i will spent some time on that.
Any of you guys have some tricks for lightmaps? I know that charts had to be in 0-1 uv space and not overlayed, but when is a good idea to split islands? Is this the same rules as normal uvs (splitted on hard edges, continuous on soft ones)?
I'll download the 64 bit on my 32 bit PC and see what happens then.
I am going to be going through the same questions myself about lightmass and specular/specular power.
By the way. The lighting is starting to look nice.
I am also probably not going to technically make the challenge for a month. It maybe like a month and a few days. I am working hard to finish up the last few things. I will continue on with this until it is finished cause I want this for a portfolio piece. I will post my work here even after the contest is technically over.
I hopefully can mess with some nDo and dDo today and clean up those tiles.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1831405#post1831405
Had some fun with the material editor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dMXzGbgQGjM
(sorry for the bad resolution, youtube downsized it.)
Liked and add to list.
I am also like the frozen synapse, btw
This is my first time tackling Cryengine. So far I love the Max integration, but like any other program, I'm stumbling through it at points.
Let me know what you think!
Here is my progress anyway
I used a different material, this is the lighter way I think. The bottom part is basic opaque shader with a reflection mask for the screen and some other parts, and the top glass material is an additive - Unlit shader. Additive blending is the cheapest to have a translucent-looking material.
With only one material, this would have required a blend_translucent shader (> Expensive, especially if you have multiple layers), for the whole static mesh (>More expensive) and also an addition alpha-blend texture. It cost an additionnal draw call for the static mesh but I think it is worth the price.
Actually for the last piece I was a bit lazy and had used all the alpha channel of my diffuse and normal map texture, so I used the diffuse texture as specular. In the material editor I made the texture power 2 (to add contrast) and multiplied it by a high value to make it stronger.
The result is not the best (especially because darker part will have really softer specular, which is not always the best fit, and you can't make some other details pop with more dirt in the specular. So the specular effect is a bit poor), but it is really fast and time saving.
Thanks!
I can show off some spec maps... they aren't anything crazy though :P
I generally just get my diffuse done, then copy it, de-saturate it, move around the levels until there is decent contrast with the most mid-tone value on the texture, then alter the base colors of the other materials until they look good :P
Lotsa testing and checking!
And here's a quick update to my scene.
I'm not even close to finishing mine yet but I think I'm going to stick with it as I seem to be learning lots from this concept (basically failing a lot, fixing the problems and trying not to do them again ^_^').