Can I bake this into normal map?

Peppek1993

Hey guys, I'm making a furnace model and I'm wondering if I will be able to bake the brick wall as a normal map somehow to not get too much triangles.

This is how it looks


And front look




So as you can see the bricks aren't really in a straight line and I don't know how to make it so they will bake nicely.

Any ideas? How far my high poly model can be from low poly to bake properly?

The picture above isn't my high poly model yet, I plan on taking it to zbrush and applying some modifiers first but I want to know if I'm going to have to UV this as it is or can I just make a big straight wall and bake the bricks on it? I think some bricks might be too far from the wall to bake properly

slosh

You would most definitely bake this stuff into a normal map.  You could model out some of the more exaggerated bricks if you want.  An env artist might be able to chime in with a better answer but for something like this, I would think it better to create a tiling texture for large surfaces and have randomness built into the texture.  Or to be efficient, maybe only sculpt one or two sides and use those for the other two sides as well.  You can break up repetition with trims textures or posts or columns.  Food for thought...

Peppek1993

Hey, thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately I don't know how to create such a texture so I went with a more simple approach and I fully understand that it probably isn't the most optimal one.

I will try to just make a simple model with a few walls and bake the bricks that way but I'm afraid the details won't show well

Alex_J

you should definitely look more into what Slosh suggested. That is essential stuff for the environment artist. You cannot avoid it if you want a job. But I think it's fun stuff to figure out, so don't be afraid if it seems complex at first. 

But what I wanted to add is that a really useful thing to do is learn how to do test bakes. Even experienced professionals aren't always sure how well something will bake or not. It takes a couple attempts, different experiments to find the best solution. 

So what you do is go ahead and make a low-poly and do an unwrap. You don't need to make the unwrap perfect, just similar to how you think the final version will be. Then do your bake and see what problems occur. If you aren't sure what is causing the problems, review the stickied threads here about normal map baking. You got to deal with some frustration but with practice you get to know the usual issues.

Remember, you aren't building a house. It's not one shot to get it right. You can try things many times many different ways to learn what works. That's the beauty of working digitally. If you find some of those rare videos on youtube in which professional game artist discuss their work, you'll see this is the normal process. Iteration on all levels. Nothing is done perfectly on the first go, and it doesn't need to be.

Eric Chadwick

Some links to help you understand the process.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/ModelingRubbleIntoAPath

HAWK12HT

Right so lets simplify it, for now ignore the back face make it a single plane and in cube form as shown. Your mission should you choose to accept make a wall with plane and add edges to extrude certain bricks out add a little bevel to extruded parts so that it bakes just fine you ll learn that more on normals page here in polycount as to why bevel extruded parts of bricks. Make a cube unwrap and bake on this your extruded brick wall mesh, you can also make a duplicate of your first mesh before doing any extrusions and use that as a low poly for bake. 

Peppek1993

Hey guys, I decided to learn the correct way of doing it and make a tiling texture myself.

Half-assed it just to figure out the process, used rock generator script to make some basic rocks and placed them onto a plane to make a nice pattern and then baked normal map out of it in 3ds max

here's what I ended up with



obviously not 100% the result I was looking for but I didnt have enough time in the morning to get all the shapes nice and how I wanted them, but I understand the process now and in the evening I will try to make a proper one and will come back to you


thanks for the help guys, helpful as always 

Peppek1993

Made everything right this time and came up with a few issues, I described them here because it seems like a problem for a completely new topic

https://polycount.com/discussion/207721/weird-results-when-baking-normal-map/p1?new=1

Here's the topic if you guys are interested in any further help

Peppek1993

Plus the outcome is not at all what I expected and anticipated. How exactly do I add this normal map to my model to make it look okay?




this looks terrible. dont even mind the gaps but the model looks horrible and 100% not what I was going for

Ruflse

Can you show the UV map you made for the lowpoly? It's hard to tell from the screenshot but I think you are trying to apply apply a tileable normal map into a model that doesn't have the UV set up to be able to use a tileable texture.

Peppek1993

I just unwrapped it to test things really quickly, wasnt even paying attention to unwrapping it very well so that might be the case. I'm aware that the rotation of texture is caused by UV being rotated in the unwrapped model but thats not my issue at all. This I can fix easily. I'm worried about other things that I'll explain.



here's how it looks, no idea how it SHOULD LOOK for a tileable texture tho?

Plus my main problem with that map is that:
a) these black bricks
b) it doesnt provide any actual info to substance painter that helps me texture stuff.

Like you can see here, my smart material just basically puts a base color on the model and does nothing else because it seems that it gets no proper informations from the map.




To compare, here's how this material behaves on a model that I properly unwrapped and baked from high poly instead of using tileable textures





So clearly a huge difference in outcome. 

I feel like I'm just doing something completely wrong and look really dumb in the process but this is completely new workflow to me as I always just baked normal maps from high poly model but this time, as people above me explained, using the tileable texture might be better. But how do I do that

Ruflse

I think you are not understanding how a texture is applied on relation to the UV of the model.
On this gif I'm using a tileable brick texture with two examples:

One where the model has some UV shells/islands/pieces with equal texel distribution (the UV's are scaled acording to the size of its polygons in the 3d space so the texture applied has the same scale along the model). It also has some of the UV shells near each other as I show you in the gif, so the texture transitions between them without a seam.

On the second example for each polygon of the model I make a new UV shell that occupies the whole UV square, so the whole texture is applied for each polygon. As you can see how the texture is applied depends of the orientation of the UV shells.



So for what you are trying to do right now, which I think is applying a tileable texture (I'm supposing it's actually tilable) to the whole model, you would have to create the UV map with as little of an amount of cuts as possible if your intention is to avoid visible seams across the model and you don't care about texture distortion or lay them near each other as I did for the gif. Anyway, some way of another you are going to have or some visible seams or texture distortion.

Here is another example where I make as little cuts as posible but I end with distortion:



Hope it help you understand a bit what you are trying to do.

Peppek1993

I understand what you're saying and how uv works but I still have no idea how can I achieve THIS





baking this





onto this




it just baffles me and I have no idea how to grasp that concept so I cant figure out how to achieve that.

how can I achieve the "3D look" on a really flat looking mesh. So far it literally looks like a wallpaper glued to the wall. Normal map does NOTHING. It just looks like a texture/picture applied to the walls. Looks horrible.

The result doesnt have any depth to it. It's basically a 2D wallpaper. It's the same as if I just drew it on the wall. I must be doing something extremely wrong and I'm frustrated because I can't find any info as to what I'm doing wrong.

Kanni3d

Peppek1993 said:

Normal map does NOTHING. It just looks like a texture/picture applied to the walls. Looks horrible.

The result doesnt have any depth to it. It's basically a 2D wallpaper. It's the same as if I just drew it on the wall.

A normal map can only do so much. Especially if that surface is just a couple of triangles. You definitely would want to add more geometry and have some geometry depth, rather than relying on a normal map to create that depth you're looking for. You could also look into displacement/tesselation, which you can easily generate from that sculpt via heightmap. (very expensive/finnicky to use though).

Eric Chadwick

Use a common strategy that actually works... Tiling normal maps for most of the structure, combined with detail geometry on the edges.

For example:
https://polycount.com/discussion/88996/my-work-at-pi/p1