First Normal Mapped Asset - Elephant!

dabu

Well stoked am I, today I created my first asset all the way through from low poly to hi poly to normal map, spec, and diffuse. I learned a ton, and can't wait to move on to my first character using this awesome new tech. I was surprised how much faster it is to texture using all the new bells and whistles, vs handpainting it all into the diffuse map like back in the day. Guess that helps offest the extra time it takes to sculpt.

Here she be...

aesir

looks great!

verybad

I'd hit it.

The one suggestion I'd make is perhaps use full RGB for the specular, as it often benefits organics very well. (I think mechanical models less) Some dark blue would be where I started.

Skulpt and overall is brilliant.

MoP

Good stuff. Looks very nice, although the lowpoly model doesn't really need that many polys (you could easily have collapsed some of those loops or used tris instead of quads).

I like how you're calling this "new tech", it's cute

odium

Your spec is letting it down, its almost like for 90% of it you just inverted the channel? Hmmm... Other than that, I think it looks fantastic.

MoP

Actually that's a good point, I didn't really look at the flat maps before, but your specular seems very odd. You've got shiny parts inside the wrinkles, which in a game would just look wrong. You could make that spec map do a lot more if you spent some more time on it. Certainly do NOT just invert the diffuse as a start for specular, in 99% of cases that will not help at all. Probably better to use the same base as the diffuse, hue-shifted towards blue, darker and with more contrast. That'd be a better base than anything inverted.

dabu

Thanks for all the encouragement, guys! Well, this is *new* tech for me, Ive been hanging out in PS2 land since I left the industry to teach over a year ago. All my students are like, "so, uh, are you going to be teaching us normal maps?" And I'm like, crap I really need to get my shit together. I agree I could bring that low poly down a bit, but I was really keen on getting it done. Noted for next time, fun to find that "barely enough geo to make it read" threshold.

I admit, I understand the specular part the least, Ive only made environment maps for mechanical stuff in the past like cars and such. Ill go back to it and tweak, any good examples of a spec for an organic model? I'm using it in the "reflected color channel" in maya 8.5

Thanks for the support.

CheeseOnToast

First off, nice model. The diffuse texture looks pretty good.

As for specular, you're using an environment map here when you should really be using a specular map. They're different things - spec maps plug into the "specular colour" part of the shader and don't reflect the environment, just the light source. Generally you'll want to use a spec map on most things and reserve environment maps for things like reflective, highly polished metals etc. Create a specular map as Mop suggested, where lighter values equal shiny, darker ones are matte. Colour in the specular map is additive, so by tinting it a blueish colour (the opposite colour of your diffuse texture) it will make the highlight tend towards a neutral grey/white.

Most modern game engines can also use gloss maps, which control how tight and sharp the specular highlight is. The "cosine power" slider of a phong shader in Maya controls this. If you use the alpha channel of your spec map as a gloss map, you can plug it into cosine power part of the shader to get this effect in the viewport. In a gloss map, lighter values create a tight, sharp highlight useful for things like plastics etc. Darker values give you a more spread out, diffuse highlight for things like rubber, dry skin and so on.

My best advice would be to create a few spheres in maya and apply a phong shader to each one. Just play around with the specular colour and cosine power sliders until you have a basic grasp of what they do.