Rendering Normal/AO Maps with hair/eyes.
Hey guys,
I want to render off some normal and AO maps but the problem is I have spheres (high poly and low poly) set in as eyeballs and low poly planes for the hair. So visually I have this:
My current workflow is this:
* Put both the high poly and low poly into XNormal (ensuring the high poly has a plane underneath to aid the AO bake) and bake them off in this form.
Now the problem I find with this, especially with the eyes, is that I will have a nice AO map baked around the area of the eye that isnt sunk into the head but then I get a deep shadow which means that for animation purposes rotating the eye isn't possible (unless I blur out areas of the ambient occlusion in photoshop).
Im just curious as to what everyone elses workflow is concerning these areas, as i'm thinking of simply emitting the eyes and hair from the bakes and doing these separately. Of course then I dont get the shadow created from the eye being sunk into the head effecting the model.
I want to render off some normal and AO maps but the problem is I have spheres (high poly and low poly) set in as eyeballs and low poly planes for the hair. So visually I have this:
My current workflow is this:
* Put both the high poly and low poly into XNormal (ensuring the high poly has a plane underneath to aid the AO bake) and bake them off in this form.
Now the problem I find with this, especially with the eyes, is that I will have a nice AO map baked around the area of the eye that isnt sunk into the head but then I get a deep shadow which means that for animation purposes rotating the eye isn't possible (unless I blur out areas of the ambient occlusion in photoshop).
Im just curious as to what everyone elses workflow is concerning these areas, as i'm thinking of simply emitting the eyes and hair from the bakes and doing these separately. Of course then I dont get the shadow created from the eye being sunk into the head effecting the model.
Replies
For one of our characters we did put a semi-transparent hemisphere in front of the eyeball that faked AO around the edges. The eye could slide around under it and the shadow was constant.
It was a pre-rendered character we got really close to the face. It did drive the animators nuts because they couldn't see past the transparency in the viewport without it causing lag or looking hideous. "Opps forgot to turn on the eye shadows again, run it out one more time..." but the end result looked good. Probably not a good idea for realtime games tho.
Ive decided to render the normal and AO maps by moving the eyeballs a fair distance away from the main mesh and leaving the hair out of the bake altogether to get this result: