Need help with normal maps.

Shiraz

Hey i have been lurking these forums for quite a while but i am yet to post anything. Anyway i have been attempting to make a brick wall mainly for practice and then for portfolio pieces. I have done the hi poly mesh but i am having issues with the baking.

The problem i am having is that the normal maps look very flat, my first inference is that it is because of the way i constructed my hi poly but other than that i am at a loss and no expert on normal maps.

I am also getting some artifacts around the edges of each brick.

Ignore the Uv distortion since i slightly changed some of them.




and




and the high poly + low



Cheers!

MoP

Looks alright to me! Get an ambient occlusion bake on the diffuse texture there, and it will help a lot with faking the depth.

hijak

maybe its just the lighting that makes it look like that. If your in default lighting maybe try making a quick 2 or 3 point light setup and using that, just looks like heavy shadowing to me. Also maybe its just me but looks like the light is coming from the bottom.

Shiraz

Thanks for the suggestions, i baked out a high quality AO map and it really did improve the illusion of depth. I will probably go over and put more geometry in the low poly to and grab as much shape as possible.

Heres what it looks like with an ao map and some better lighting.

Eric Chadwick

This might give you some ideas about how to improve your AO.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Ambient_Occlusion_Map

Shiraz

Cheers man looks like a great idea, cant wait to test it out.