Normal/Displacement Mapping Issues

AfterbanG

Im in dire need of some assistance here. Im currently going to school for game art and design, yet we have not learned how to apply normal or displacemnt maps to our character models and I need to learn this stuff for my demo real. I learned how to use Zbrush in my own free time, and how to create normal and displacement maps, but not how to apply them in maya.

Can anyone help me out here? Im confused and have no idea how to do this, and i've searched through the forums without being able to find anything at my level explaining on how to do this. Everythings too advanced!

cholden

I have a basic explaination of setting up materials in maya here
http://chrisholden.net/tutor/tutshellnorm.htm
http://chrisholden.net/tutor/util01.htm

AfterbanG

Cool, thx for the tutorials. I have a question though. Are these based off maya 7 or earlier versions, because my school uses maya 8 and I cannot find the "transfersurfaceinfo" pluggin. I think they might have replaced it with something else but I can't find any info on it in maya help.

fogmann

In Maya 8, you don't need Transfer Surface Info, as normal map baking utilities are loaded by default and are found now under Lighting/Shading > Transfer Maps. Just look for Transfer Maps in help to get more info on baking normal maps, ambient occlusion, color, displacement etc, from high to low poly model.

But if you already have your normal and displacement generated in ZBrush, you can skip this. The easiest way to apply normal map to a model is to just apply it as bump and in bump map attribute editor set Use As: Tangent Space Normals.

This had some rendering issues in previous versions of Maya so you had to use plugins, but since Maya 8 I noticed that mental ray renders the normal maps as it should, while Maya software still renders it as bumpmap (no matter if you set it to Tangent Space Normals or not).

AfterbanG

Thx fogman! Really appreciated. Im going to play around in maya now and try all of these wonderful things.

AfterbanG

It seems I hit another wall with this normal mapping thing. When I generate my normal map within Zbrush, it only ends up creating half of my map. For example, it will contain half my characters torso, head, leg, but not the opposite side.

Any ideas toward what may be causing this? thx!