The palm (or the lack of it) looks weird and so does the wrist joint from the back view.
Im not a big fan of how the fake stomatch/groin changes so much either side of the belt.
superb, love the whole idea! The palm in the 3rd shot does look a little odd to me (or at least mine dips in more between the thumb muscle and the one opposite) could just be the lighting/angle, and of course everyones hands are different. Really looking forward to seeing it complete
That's really nice DAZ - I wasn't sold on the concept at the start but it has come together very well... he's got alot of character in those last shots. His boots - especially the back- look a bit bland at the minute to me though.
Sort of reminds me of the bad guy from Farscape. Very nice work, Daz. I kinda' like him in black and white, hehe. He's plenty interesting without color.
EDIT: Oops, didn't notice the Farscape guy's resemblance has already been mentioned.
Damn, nice character, i dig the relaxed evil expression. I noticed the ear is kind of low but i guess that's what happens when you turn into an old geezer.
lo poly done and weighing in at 4,999 tris. Just need to unwrap and paint this bastard.
malcolm: helmet, boots, torso, belt, arm battle comms. are smooth proxy, the rest is Zbrush.
Any of you guys done much normal mapping in maya 7.0? Cos I haven't so you'd better help me!
2 major issues that Im having are:
1) The funky little areas where it seems like the rays cant quite get to. Any advice here? ( this is the highest sampling setting )
2) Oddly, it seems like this isn't 100% the normals from my hi poly, but I also see some triangulation shading artifacts that look to be coming from the normals of the low. Weird
One more thing. Anyone know If there's a way to get the surface sampler to use mental ray for a texture bake? I want to make an AO map, but I can't think of a way to do that without UVmapping my hi with the exact same layout as my low, and Im sure as hell not attempting that.
hi Daz, I'm no expert here but I know couple things that might help you out, first did you soften all the edges on the low poly before you do the normal bake? also try freeze transformation on both models when you do the bake, it might eliminate some of those weird shadings you see on your normal map. Also what is the setting you used inside surface sampler?
heh thanks guys. Yeah, I made sure all my edges on my low poly are soft and neither model has transformations.
Settings are currently:
tangent space map space, transfer in world space, sampling quality high, filter type gaussian and 3.0000, fill texture seams 1, search method: closest to envelope, match using: geometry normals.
Just because you see the triangulation of the low in your normal map does not mean its wrong. The normal map is simply correcting the normals of the low through the map to look like the high poly. The normals of the low poly do matter when using the normal map and any changes to the normals of the low will effect the normal map and the way it is trying to correct them. I cant help ya with maya but I can tell that you are getting some weird errors on the arms and legs. The normals seem to be local space there and not tangent space like the rest of your map.
okay Daz this is the setting I used, gernerally I keep my sampling quality in medium it usually gives me the best result. Also for the search method, I used inside envlope than outside envlope with 20% search depth. I'm not exactly sure if this is going to solve your problem but it might be worth trying. I really wish there is a better way to bake normal in maya like 3dsmax does
Hey Daz: First off I think Maya's doing something weird... the back of the coat looks right but the normals on the arm look crazy, if the lowpoly surface conforms even reasonably to the shape of the high, then the normal map should never get that colour, it should stay a mostly consistant shade of violet like seen on the back-of-coat normals.
Also how are you setting up your models for grabbing surface info? I'm not sure how you do it in Maya, but... here is a screenshot illustrating what I mean about the colour of the arm normals (that's a cropped version of my guy's arm normal map, note the mostly consistent colour, shouldn't really go to green or yellow or something's a bit wrong), also it shows how I set up my model for normal-grabbing - namely pulling apart the separate pieces that would lead to clipping issues and ray casting errors.
You should only really do this with pieces which aren't physically connected since if you detach a piece, the smoothing around it will change, and that'll lead to normals looking odd when you re-attach and weld.
I should ask if you're stacking those UVs, since that might cause problems - I grabbed the mirrored/stacked elements like the arm and leg and moved the 2nd version off the 0-1 range by exactly one UV unit, so that it's tiled across but the program won't try to render 2 sets of normals to one pixel at once, if you know what I mean? That could be causing these shading issues.
Also like RE3456 said, make sure your lowpoly has no hard edges at all, this will generate the best normal map.
Hit me up on MSN if you need any more info.
Hope you get it sorted!
Edit: Hahaha I spent far too long on that, 3 replies popped up while I was typing. I was gonna mention what Bryan Cavett said too, don't worry if you can kinda see triangle shapes on the normal map, it's just the normals compensating for the change in direction on the lowpoly.
Awesome MoP you just nailed it thanks. I was 'stacking' yes This is like the 2nd time ever messing with normal mapping for me. Ah PS2 dev. is so painfully simple in comparison
So there's tons of very useful info for me here thanks mate. Onto breaking up the model and UV fiddling!
As for "tons of very useful info", I stole most of what I'm talking about from Per128, who kindly put together this PowerPoint presentation on normal-mapping techniques. It's been hanging around for a while now but it has some handy tips in and it's worth a quick flick through. Thanks you crazy Norwegian!
I think you when move the UVs over before you process the maps in Maya it creates messed up maps as well. You'll probably have to delete all the duped geometry until after you process the maps. Then move the UVs for the duped geometry in the 0 to -1 UV space. I've never done it on Maya 7.0, but that was the workflow in 6.5.
Dont delete your duped geometry it's important that it's still there, lets say your arms are using the same UV space, if you delete the geometry of one of the arms, where that matches up to the body the normal map will be rendered incorrectly. I suggest just selecting all duped/overlaying UVs and just scaling them down and put them in a small area of the map then after the normals are rendered scale them back to their original spot.
From what I can see, it looks like your high poly geometry was penetrating the envelope on couple of places, a bit on the face and the two tiny spots on the coat, which is easy to fix in Photoshop.
I also used Maya for normal map sampling, and to me it seemed like editing envelope instead of increasing its search depth helped to eliminate weird normal calculations and areas that turn out brownish (and render black). Basically, I left search envelope percentage pretty low, around 6-8%, and then tweaked the envelope vertices to completely enclose the high poly geometry, and also to be well related to the low poly mesh, so the rays get the good path to travel.
As far as AO baking goes, I don't think you can do it through surface sampler, from hi poly to low. Instead, when you have your normal map on the low poly, you could bake the occlusion with mental ray batch bake. I haven't actually tried occlusion baking, but GI and light + color seem to work fine and the details from normal map are transferred to the lightmap.
PS ~ I've read your awesome modeling tutorial and if nobody yet told you how to find n-sided polys in Maya, here's how: switch to face selection, go to edit polygons > selection > selection constraints... and check All and Next, and below that for order check Nsided and back in the viewport you'll see your nsided faces selected. Remember to check Nothing as constraint when you're done.
Many thanks all. Simply moving the previously stacked UV's into a range beyond 0-1 was all that it took.
Several obvious artifacts here, but progress is promising. This is the low with normal in Santiagos xnormal. Makes a great little viewer. The only reason Im using maya over it for generating normal maps is that the splitting up the mesh part would require exporting about 6 objs out of maya as opposed to just showing and hiding everything in one maya scene
fogmann, thanks for the tip. That's a neat idea using the normal map to generate an AO map. I'll dig around thanks.
OK Im almost in panic mode. I only have sunday. Colour only just begun. Need to rig this bastard too. Shite, this is gonna be touch and go. I knew I shouldn't have gone out tonight. OK, so showing normal maps in the viewport in maya no problem. But *rendering* normal maps nicely in maya is something else entirely. Can anyone point me to a shader or hypershade tut anywhere? Ideally it works in mental ray but I can get away with the maya renderer If need be. Thanks!
Daz: not sure what you mean render "nicely" but the certainly can render pretty well.
Maya 7 just attach it as a 2d bumpmap to any normal material that supports them, in the 2d bump attributes set the Use As field to tangent space normals, and pull the bump depth down a lot. I set it to 0.05 for the below render.
Note that the normals on the hat are inverted, as this is just converted via the nvidia ps filter, and the hat is upside down on the map.
Thanks Vailias. I only just got maya 7 so I didn't realise this was built in now.
I have a nice map now, but I can't figure out what to do about the mirroring. Maya doesn't seem to like it:
Furthermore, a render looks completely and utterly broken.
Much that it saddens me to say this guys, I think Im just going to have to face the music here. I'm not going to finish. I have yet to colour or rig this guy. This is my first fully normal mapped character and I am just plagued by technical issues. Its just too much of a learning curve to get over in the rest of today. I had a blast and learnt tons though. Thanks.
Oh I'll finish the bastard allright. Just not by the end of today, which is all the time I have. Haven't tried that yet, but its a bit moot If I cant even render out of maya which is what i need to do for the final stage. This is how a render looks:
He does look pretty evil.. not quite in the way intended though . One of our strongest warriors won't make it to the battle . It'll look sweet when its done man
[ QUOTE ]
Oh I'll finish the bastard allright. Just not by the end of today, which is all the time I have. Haven't tried that yet, but its a bit moot If I cant even render out of maya which is what i need to do for the final stage. This is how a render looks:
[/ QUOTE ]
Hi Daz, I had the exact same problem on my general's ship when I did the mirroring (from x to -x), after some research I found that you simply can't mirroring a geometry with NM on it, not in maya anyway. Technically you still can do it, what I did with my ship just flip some part of the square UVs horizontally and it turns out alright, but obviously it won't work with the character as the UV is asymmetry after flipping. I could be wrong but thought I'd share my experience anyway
okkun thanks, but the models normals are fine. Its the normal map UV's that are the issue.
Yeah I figured that was the case man thanks. Im basically hosed. At a major stretch I'd have been able to colour and rig and pose this guy by the end of the day. But now I have to re-UVmap it, there is just no way Thanks again man. Gutted.
Replies
Im not a big fan of how the fake stomatch/groin changes so much either side of the belt.
Otherwise i really dig it.
EDIT: Oops, didn't notice the Farscape guy's resemblance has already been mentioned.
malcolm: helmet, boots, torso, belt, arm battle comms. are smooth proxy, the rest is Zbrush.
(however, to some people, it may lack of pipes and rivets ahah:))
very cool
chico
I dig man. I dig
2 major issues that Im having are:
1) The funky little areas where it seems like the rays cant quite get to. Any advice here? ( this is the highest sampling setting )
2) Oddly, it seems like this isn't 100% the normals from my hi poly, but I also see some triangulation shading artifacts that look to be coming from the normals of the low. Weird
One more thing. Anyone know If there's a way to get the surface sampler to use mental ray for a texture bake? I want to make an AO map, but I can't think of a way to do that without UVmapping my hi with the exact same layout as my low, and Im sure as hell not attempting that.
I cannot wait to see yours all done man. Your work is always top shelf and an inspiration.
Good luck!
Settings are currently:
tangent space map space, transfer in world space, sampling quality high, filter type gaussian and 3.0000, fill texture seams 1, search method: closest to envelope, match using: geometry normals.
Also how are you setting up your models for grabbing surface info? I'm not sure how you do it in Maya, but... here is a screenshot illustrating what I mean about the colour of the arm normals (that's a cropped version of my guy's arm normal map, note the mostly consistent colour, shouldn't really go to green or yellow or something's a bit wrong), also it shows how I set up my model for normal-grabbing - namely pulling apart the separate pieces that would lead to clipping issues and ray casting errors.
You should only really do this with pieces which aren't physically connected since if you detach a piece, the smoothing around it will change, and that'll lead to normals looking odd when you re-attach and weld.
I should ask if you're stacking those UVs, since that might cause problems - I grabbed the mirrored/stacked elements like the arm and leg and moved the 2nd version off the 0-1 range by exactly one UV unit, so that it's tiled across but the program won't try to render 2 sets of normals to one pixel at once, if you know what I mean? That could be causing these shading issues.
Also like RE3456 said, make sure your lowpoly has no hard edges at all, this will generate the best normal map.
Hit me up on MSN if you need any more info.
Hope you get it sorted!
Edit: Hahaha I spent far too long on that, 3 replies popped up while I was typing. I was gonna mention what Bryan Cavett said too, don't worry if you can kinda see triangle shapes on the normal map, it's just the normals compensating for the change in direction on the lowpoly.
Awesome MoP you just nailed it thanks. I was 'stacking' yes
So there's tons of very useful info for me here thanks mate. Onto breaking up the model and UV fiddling!
As for "tons of very useful info", I stole most of what I'm talking about from Per128, who kindly put together this PowerPoint presentation on normal-mapping techniques. It's been hanging around for a while now but it has some handy tips in and it's worth a quick flick through. Thanks you crazy Norwegian!
I also used Maya for normal map sampling, and to me it seemed like editing envelope instead of increasing its search depth helped to eliminate weird normal calculations and areas that turn out brownish (and render black). Basically, I left search envelope percentage pretty low, around 6-8%, and then tweaked the envelope vertices to completely enclose the high poly geometry, and also to be well related to the low poly mesh, so the rays get the good path to travel.
As far as AO baking goes, I don't think you can do it through surface sampler, from hi poly to low. Instead, when you have your normal map on the low poly, you could bake the occlusion with mental ray batch bake. I haven't actually tried occlusion baking, but GI and light + color seem to work fine and the details from normal map are transferred to the lightmap.
PS ~ I've read your awesome modeling tutorial and if nobody yet told you how to find n-sided polys in Maya, here's how: switch to face selection, go to edit polygons > selection > selection constraints... and check All and Next, and below that for order check Nsided and back in the viewport you'll see your nsided faces selected. Remember to check Nothing as constraint when you're done.
Several obvious artifacts here, but progress is promising. This is the low with normal in Santiagos xnormal. Makes a great little viewer. The only reason Im using maya over it for generating normal maps is that the splitting up the mesh part would require exporting about 6 objs out of maya as opposed to just showing and hiding everything in one maya scene
fogmann, thanks for the tip. That's a neat idea using the normal map to generate an AO map. I'll dig around thanks.
Maya 7 just attach it as a 2d bumpmap to any normal material that supports them, in the 2d bump attributes set the Use As field to tangent space normals, and pull the bump depth down a lot. I set it to 0.05 for the below render.
Note that the normals on the hat are inverted, as this is just converted via the nvidia ps filter, and the hat is upside down on the map.
I have a nice map now, but I can't figure out what to do about the mirroring. Maya doesn't seem to like it:
Furthermore, a render looks completely and utterly broken.
Much that it saddens me to say this guys, I think Im just going to have to face the music here. I'm not going to finish. I have yet to colour or rig this guy. This is my first fully normal mapped character and I am just plagued by technical issues. Its just too much of a learning curve to get over in the rest of today. I had a blast and learnt tons though. Thanks.
as for previewing the normals, what happens when you view it in Santiago's viewer?
Shame you're not gonna have time to finish, this guy was shaping up really awesometasticfully.
p.s maya blows for realtime work.
Try releasing the normals and making sure the mesh has all the normals going in the right direction, Maya has a nasty habit of hiding normal errors.
Oh I'll finish the bastard allright. Just not by the end of today, which is all the time I have. Haven't tried that yet, but its a bit moot If I cant even render out of maya which is what i need to do for the final stage. This is how a render looks:
[/ QUOTE ]
Hi Daz, I had the exact same problem on my general's ship when I did the mirroring (from x to -x), after some research I found that you simply can't mirroring a geometry with NM on it, not in maya anyway. Technically you still can do it, what I did with my ship just flip some part of the square UVs horizontally and it turns out alright, but obviously it won't work with the character as the UV is asymmetry after flipping. I could be wrong but thought I'd share my experience anyway
Yeah I figured that was the case man thanks. Im basically hosed. At a major stretch I'd have been able to colour and rig and pose this guy by the end of the day. But now I have to re-UVmap it, there is just no way