making normal maps and texture for a tileset?
looking for advice on this, I don't really know much about 3d art, more of a 2d artist.
So I have a tileset, currently divided into small pieces like so:
It's pretty much just a beveled cube divided into quarters and then modified to each shape. They will be joined into the full tiles I need and then imported to Unity where I have a tile manager system.
So, I'm making sort of a 2.5d platformer and I need to make a tiling texture as well as normal maps (I want the edges of the tiles to be very smooth looking).
Do I make one quarter of the texture and then use mirror modifiers to make them tile? how do I make the normal maps for smoothness? guh, so many questions. What do I do here?
I'm using Blender, I figure I'll just follow some tutorials for the whole baking normal maps part, but I'm confused about what to do in relation to using mirrors and optimizing and whatnot.
Can I use the same normal map texture for each corner? but then use a different diffuse texture as well?
So I have a tileset, currently divided into small pieces like so:
It's pretty much just a beveled cube divided into quarters and then modified to each shape. They will be joined into the full tiles I need and then imported to Unity where I have a tile manager system.
So, I'm making sort of a 2.5d platformer and I need to make a tiling texture as well as normal maps (I want the edges of the tiles to be very smooth looking).
Do I make one quarter of the texture and then use mirror modifiers to make them tile? how do I make the normal maps for smoothness? guh, so many questions. What do I do here?
I'm using Blender, I figure I'll just follow some tutorials for the whole baking normal maps part, but I'm confused about what to do in relation to using mirrors and optimizing and whatnot.
Can I use the same normal map texture for each corner? but then use a different diffuse texture as well?
Replies
Depends. It's a tradeoff between better texture resolution with having 4 times repeated same texture (forces you to be more subtle with details, unless you want it to be visible) and lower polycount with lower-res less repetitive textures.
For smoothness? If you meant smoothing groups (smooth/ flat shading in blender), you don't need normal maps for that. If you meant that as a projection thing, just make hi-poly smooth and your normal map will have the same effect (although with round objects you often want more geometry for silhouette).
You can reuse it as much as you want, if the low-poly normal is same as the normal of low-poly model you used when baking you will get same results.
That is more of an engine question, than normal map question. But yes, if you want your corners to use same normal map, there aren't any issues with that.:)