Im pretty new to this whole thing and I have no idea if this had been asked but, say im lazy with a mesh and want to do the small stuff is it possible to bake a normal with one mesh?
I'm not sure what you mean by one mesh but you can just model whatever you want, UV it, then sculpt it in zbrush. Then you can just bake from the high to the low and its the same mesh. You don't need to retopo if that's what you mean. I think when you bake though, you still need to slot them as separate meshes.
What i mean is, Say i have a knife blade and i want to add the deep scratches. But i only have the main mesh. And i just want to bake a map from that with out a another mesh. Atm im converting the defuse into the normal and it works but the quality is horrible.
Use NDO2, its perfect for this. I use it for surface details that I dont want to do in zbrush or is easier to control in photoshop. There's no baking, you just use it once your in photoshop and it will create normals on the fly.
Converting your diffuse to normal won't look good, what you want do to is either a proper highpoly or if you are going to do a texture to normal you need to give that attention.
Make a seperate texture that you will use to generate the normal from, with only the details you want, best to keep it clean from to much noise.
you can in fact do that, with a bit of planning you can get nice shading made from the lowpoly. But the lowpoly might not be the most optimized.
It's a technique i came up with for Project Phoenix, an indiegame we are just working on. I didn't want to lose normalmapped shading on lowpoly characters just due to budget constraints.
here is an example, no highpolymodelling or sculpting involved, this is the lowpoly with baked normals from the doublesmoothed lowpoly.
The main idea is, that highpoly = lowpoly doublesmoothed. To save time with cage set up or fiddling with ray distance I use a very old baking techniqued called UVmatch.
So once your lowpoly is done, your highpoly can be as well (tho you can sculpt that if you like or need to)
The workflow has a few downsides but also some up sides you should not underestimate.
the upsides are:
- speed, no highpolymodelling or sculpting needed to get good enough looking normalmaps
- no need to set up a cage or fiddle with raydistance
- it's a quick way to mock up meshes for clients as well, if they need something ingame quick you can do it this way
the downsides are:
- Uvs need to be done prior to sculpting
- If you don't sculpt you have the uvs ready once the lowpoly is done and mapped
- mirroring uvs inside the UVspace is impossible, as the rays will be cast into the wrong direction. classical mirroring by mapping one side and moving the other by a unit outside of the active uvspace is possible
- it's not fool or errorproof, if you don't stay within the workflow, say you think you like to sculpt now and unwrap later, it will brake as the highpoly needs the same uvs as the lowpoly. But if you want to use a cage or raydistance this downside falls away. But this again eats time setting up.
- meshes can not be as optimized as you usually would do them as you have to take care that they shade well when doublesmoothed
- doublesmooth gives you no control over indidividual edges, it's either all soft or hard
- you can hardly create shading errors, or have one piece of an asset overlap another in your bakes, as they do not overlap in the UVs
that that it has some downsides but the speed you gain is what i have been after, not perfectly sculpted and tuned bakes, quick iterations and good enough assets for indiegames.
Replies
Then don't be lazy with it, problem fixed
Converting your diffuse to normal won't look good, what you want do to is either a proper highpoly or if you are going to do a texture to normal you need to give that attention.
Make a seperate texture that you will use to generate the normal from, with only the details you want, best to keep it clean from to much noise.
It's a technique i came up with for Project Phoenix, an indiegame we are just working on. I didn't want to lose normalmapped shading on lowpoly characters just due to budget constraints.
here is an example, no highpolymodelling or sculpting involved, this is the lowpoly with baked normals from the doublesmoothed lowpoly.
The main idea is, that highpoly = lowpoly doublesmoothed. To save time with cage set up or fiddling with ray distance I use a very old baking techniqued called UVmatch.
So once your lowpoly is done, your highpoly can be as well (tho you can sculpt that if you like or need to)
The workflow has a few downsides but also some up sides you should not underestimate.
the upsides are:
- speed, no highpolymodelling or sculpting needed to get good enough looking normalmaps
- no need to set up a cage or fiddle with raydistance
- it's a quick way to mock up meshes for clients as well, if they need something ingame quick you can do it this way
the downsides are:
- Uvs need to be done prior to sculpting
- If you don't sculpt you have the uvs ready once the lowpoly is done and mapped
- mirroring uvs inside the UVspace is impossible, as the rays will be cast into the wrong direction. classical mirroring by mapping one side and moving the other by a unit outside of the active uvspace is possible
- it's not fool or errorproof, if you don't stay within the workflow, say you think you like to sculpt now and unwrap later, it will brake as the highpoly needs the same uvs as the lowpoly. But if you want to use a cage or raydistance this downside falls away. But this again eats time setting up.
- meshes can not be as optimized as you usually would do them as you have to take care that they shade well when doublesmoothed
- doublesmooth gives you no control over indidividual edges, it's either all soft or hard
- you can hardly create shading errors, or have one piece of an asset overlap another in your bakes, as they do not overlap in the UVs
that that it has some downsides but the speed you gain is what i have been after, not perfectly sculpted and tuned bakes, quick iterations and good enough assets for indiegames.