My own 3ds max question to ask

Wolfer

Hi there so I have some experience with 3ds max but i have more things I want to learn so I have a few of my own questions.  First there is using subdivision. Thats where it involves using the subdivision surface and involves using nurms subdivision am I correct. Second is it wise to use that a lot or just to bump things up a notch as I notice it does add more poly that is necessary. Want to make sure I understand what it means to use subdivision.  Also my next question is baking, that means to take the model that have detail and make it into a texture. This is a way to add a detail in to help cut down polygon and use a low poly am I right.

musashidan

Sub-division means dividing each quad face into 4; which quadruples your polycount.(triangles and n-gons will also be multiplied by 4) Your mesh still remains as a polygonal cage below the sub-div result and only becomes true geometry is you collapse the mesh back to a polygonal mesh.

Baking a map - in this case a normal map -  from a high-poly mesh to its low-poly counterpart means that the surface normals are projected from the vertex angle of the high-poly and stored(baked) in an encoded RGB texture(where each R/G/B value represents lighting information)that when placed on the low-poly gives the illusion of the high-poly details. This is just a basic overview of a complex subject. I recommend reading the WIKI from these forums for better explanations of the above.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount

Eric Chadwick

"My own 3ds max question to ask" is not a great thread title. Please see the Info sticky. A better one for your thread would be "[3ds Max] subdivision? baking?" This will help you get faster answers in the future.

A couple good pages to check out on the wiki
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Subdivision_Surface_Modeling
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking

Wolfer

sorry I'm new to the site. First time here.  I'll make sure to read it.