3ds Max - projection modifier help

tomatkins100

Hi all

Apologies in advance but I am unable to attach any screenshots at the moment as I am at work but I need a little help.

I have a scene that I'm working on with Doric columns, 2 rows of 5 that I have low poly models of. I have uv mapped these together, so I can get variation when texturing.

I have a high poly, which I will duplicate an move to get the normal maps from. Te issue I'm having is alignment. Is there any tool or easy way to align each high poly with the corresponding low poly? All 10 low poly columns are currently one object, because of uv mapping. I did manage to get a bake of normal and AO maps but because of the alignment it's wrong. You can tell when I add the normal in the material slot.

Thanks

Octo

If they are misaligned, why don't you just align them?
You could add an edit poly on top of your lowpoly and move them into place in sub object mode..just delete or deactivate the edit poly modifier to move them back. Sometimes I set all the pivots on my highpoly objects to the world center, and move those into place..to move them back, just set xyz to 0.
You can separate the different lowpoly chunks and still unwrap them all btw.

tomatkins100

I tried to align them manually but I'm not aware of any way of getting a more accurate result. I'm after something that will get them bob on. It's not something I've done before so I'm wondering if people generally do it manually or if there's a particular method to it

Noors

There's an align tool in max that will align an object to another


But you have to find the center of each of your lp columns first.
You could detach each of them and align to their center, or snap a dummy to the center of each column and align your high on it...
There are plenty ways to do that.

Mark Dygert

I agree with Noors, making sure the pivot points match will help you keep them aligned.

I don't really understand why you're moving the high poly from pillar to pillar and baking it? Wouldn't you just bake it once and then copy around the final baked model?

If you need faces to better follow the shape and contours of the high poly you can try using the conform brush in the graphite modeling tools. You have your low poly target the high and as you paint the surface of the low conforms to the surface of the high.

There are other tools and scripts that do similar things and might give you more flexablity than the conform brush. With "Max Retopo" and "Wrap-It" you can use standard tools in edit poly and it conforms to the surface of the high. Both of those scripts allow you to shrink one mesh onto another and then edit in various ways. Wrap-it is a lot better than max-retopo but max retopo is free, wrap-it isn't, but both are better than the conform brush.

tomatkins100

Thanks everyone. I've sorted it now. Used the align tool and it worked a treat. As I say I've only just really started getting my head around max, and I'm on home study too so in terms of correct workflow for these sorts of things I'm extremely short in knowledge. Definitely learned something today though! Onwards and upwards!

Thanks again - I've taken everything on board