Baking detail into a low poly model from a hi res
polycounter lvl 19
I was wondering if there is a good way to bake in the detail from a high res model to low poly one. I'm not refering to normal mapping. Let say you model a hi poly tank, with the intention of using it to generate the texture of a low poly model. You take the time to model the bevels so it catches the highlights and all that other good stuff. Then you texture it with shaders and bitmaps. I'm wondering what is a good way to use this to create the texture of the low poly model? Can the render to texture feature in max for example output this information to a low poly model? Thanks in advance.
Alex
Alex
Replies
It's dead easy in Max7 though, once you have your two models (untextured, UV-mapped lowpoly mesh, and a textured/lit highpoly model) you just apply a Projection modifier to the lowpoly mesh, go to the Render to Texture window, and tell it to render a CompleteMap. That will get all the texture, lighting and shadow information from the highpoly model.
However, if you have mirrored or stacked UV's on the lowpoly mesh, the render might not come out properly - you can move duplicate UV's off to the side of the UV map square when rendering though, and put them back afterwards and that usually works.
It's basically set up exactly the same way as normal mapping, but you render a CompleteMap instead of a NormalsMap. You could even render out fullbright textures, or just a shadow map by itself to overlay on a painted texture. I use that quite a lot, it's useful.
So yeah, that's definitely possible (even easy!) in Max7. You might be able to use ORB or some other normalmapping program to render textures, but I doubt it'd be as effective or full-featured as the Max7 renderer.
MoP
Also, I remember something for max4 that baked light onto a map but can't for the life of me remember what it was called. You could probably use this.
It does have some problems though, you can't use external renderers with it, ala Brazil or finalRender. It doesn't bake specular directly, you have to move the maps to another material channel like diffuse. It doesn't like any anti-aliasing filter except Area. Also it isn't free... well, we got it free for beta-testing, but that doesn't count.
But I would recommend buying it anyhow, it's very powerful. The object/matID/UV filter options are great, and the cage mesh is cool too, basically the same thing as max7's projection modifier.
I was going to try it again, seeing as MAX 5's render to texture got borked by SP2
Not sure about XP...
I forgot to do this last time and had some streaking.