Baking and Normals Workflow
mod
Ok, im trying to learn baking, but im a bit iffy on the workflow of it all.
Ive created a high poly, and am almost done the low poly. But, i want to zBrush some of it as well. I tried bringing in the highpoly to zBrush, but when i brought it back to Max, it said no enough memory.
So what am i to do? do i get the normal map from the low or high poly? Do i unwrap both? from what i understand, im suppose to have both high and low poly in max for the baking, because it projects the light maps from the high to the low.
Whats the best way to go about this?
Ive created a high poly, and am almost done the low poly. But, i want to zBrush some of it as well. I tried bringing in the highpoly to zBrush, but when i brought it back to Max, it said no enough memory.
So what am i to do? do i get the normal map from the low or high poly? Do i unwrap both? from what i understand, im suppose to have both high and low poly in max for the baking, because it projects the light maps from the high to the low.
Whats the best way to go about this?
Replies
You should only need to UV the lowpoly.
Only your low poly model needs UVs. For your first bake, make sure that none of your UVs are flipped/mirrored or overlapped, for simplicity's sake.
The baking process basically compares the surface normals on your high poly model with those on the low poly, and generates a normal map from that. Lots of things can effect the final quality of your map, including how your low poly is constructed, its UVs, the resolution of the map and which tool you're using to bake with. Ben Mathis has a nice and easy step by step of baking in Max on his site, here :
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow.htm
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