Baking a high poly onto a low poly

Brewwman

Hello, I am a little new so please be a little patient what I am mostly going to be doing is creating items for dota2. But i saw a guy in maya lt wrap his high poly sword in a low poly sword, then he baked them both, with the high poly as a source or something. What resulted was a lower poly, but good looking item. Would you be able to do the same thing in blender, which is what im using? Or was that just a result of adding the high polys texture to the low poly? Any help would be appreciated.

Fwap

Not familiar with blender, but i'm pretty sure you could.
You could always use xNormal, plenty of tutorials for it, better results than baking in a 3d package.

Bruno Afonseca

Hello there,

There should be a way of doing that in blender but I also advise xNormal.

We bake most notably normal maps, but all sorts of other maps to help the texturing process as well. Seeing that you're not very familiar with the concept of baking, here's some homework for you:
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryTexturing%5Cb%29
You might need to read the whole thing multiple times until you get a grasp of it. Took me a while!
You might also want to do some tests as you go with basic shapes, this will help you understand it.

Hope this helps!

Brewwman

Thank you Very Much! this will be very helpful

mortalhuman

Blender's normal map baking lacks internal AA and as such produces either crappy results, or you have to make an image too big (and you don't edit normal maps after they bake, so resizing is not a professional option). If this has changed, let me know. But afaik, as nice and easy as their baking setup is, it's really not production ready due to the fact normals need to be baked huge to get around the pixelation.

Look into xNormal for baking if you are using Blender for modeling. But check with the freenode blender chat or their community to see if there are improvements that now negate this advice.

Here is a write up about baking in blender:

https://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/06/30/normal_maps_blender_2_5/

But again, check and see if it's still lacking aa passes and stuff first, if so, look up some xnormal normal baking tuts.