Baking details into a flat plane?
polycounter lvl 3
I've been playing around with this for a while, but I've noticed that large amounts of games have a lot of details baked into flat planes, especially for floors, walls, and ceilings. They supplement this with more 3D objects, but they still somehow get huge amounts of detail into their walls.
I tried this myself using Substance Painter, and a set of Alphas that were offered for free on the internet. I started playing with it, and I was able to stamp MASSIVE "objects" into my wall, which was just a single plane. However, I was trying to make something for my floor, and I had the low poly be perfectly flat, while the high poly had two long grooves and several other divots inset into it. For the grooves, I only dropped the insets down by -0.5cm in 3DS max. When I baked it, it didn't look very clean at all:
This raised two questions for me:
One, how can I get the bake detail that I want from a high poly to a low poly that's just a plane? Surely it's somehow possible, because the alphas can give me AMAZING results on the same mesh, as pictured below:
Those grooves in the floor, or "ceiling grates" that I'm thinking about adding in just don't look right at all with alphas, and it's very difficult to get the same precision as the mesh itself, baking from high to low poly.
The second question is, and I've gotten hints of this from other threads, but how can I start making alphas like this myself? Somebody mentioned something about projecting something onto a plane in ZBrush one time, but I'm a little too much of a beginner to understand that without a lot more steps/detail. Thanks in advance for the help!
I tried this myself using Substance Painter, and a set of Alphas that were offered for free on the internet. I started playing with it, and I was able to stamp MASSIVE "objects" into my wall, which was just a single plane. However, I was trying to make something for my floor, and I had the low poly be perfectly flat, while the high poly had two long grooves and several other divots inset into it. For the grooves, I only dropped the insets down by -0.5cm in 3DS max. When I baked it, it didn't look very clean at all:
This raised two questions for me:
One, how can I get the bake detail that I want from a high poly to a low poly that's just a plane? Surely it's somehow possible, because the alphas can give me AMAZING results on the same mesh, as pictured below:
Those grooves in the floor, or "ceiling grates" that I'm thinking about adding in just don't look right at all with alphas, and it's very difficult to get the same precision as the mesh itself, baking from high to low poly.
The second question is, and I've gotten hints of this from other threads, but how can I start making alphas like this myself? Somebody mentioned something about projecting something onto a plane in ZBrush one time, but I'm a little too much of a beginner to understand that without a lot more steps/detail. Thanks in advance for the help!
Replies
As for alphas in Zbrush, its the easiest thing ever. Anything you do in the Zbrush canvas can be captured as a depth/alpha map by using the 'grab doc' function in the alpha palette. You can then use that custom alpha on any brush.