Hello! I just joined today. I was wondering if you guys could help me with something.

Dallas Robinson

Hi, I just joined today. I just came off a three year job working on the PSP as an environment artist and now I get to learn all about current gen of games. It's been an uphill battle. Anyway, I have a few questions.

1.) How exactly to you render your normal maps in Maya? I'm rendering in 'hardware mode' and everything comes out like a crappy version of what's in my view port. I want it to just render exactly what I'm seeing in the view port. I don't think i can use a playblast or screen shots because i want to compost an AO layer over it to give me an idea of how it would look in a basic Engine. (since i don't have one to throw my stuff into:-) )

2.) why do my normal maps sometimes 'Invert"? in becomes out and out becomes in? I'm pretty sure it has to do with the RGB information on the Normal map being flipped when i negative scale something. there has to be an easy way around this i just can't seem to find it.

Sorry if this stuff seems too basic but i am kinda a NOOB. I understand all the tutorials I'm reading and doing but there always seems the some basic things are missing.

Oh, and if you wanna see my Portfolio here it is.
http://dallasrobinson.daportfolio.com/

Ged

number 2 is probably like you say the normals being flipped over on all the polys so find the command to flip the normals. Sorry Im not a maya user but it could be something like "on the Polygons menu select Normals->Reverse"

welcome to polycount

Draffin

Change "hardware mode" to mental ray for a better renderer.

danshewan

Hey Dallas, welcome to polycount.

Aside from the technical issues, I'd lose the third-person artist's bio from your site - it sounds really pretentious, and doesn't come off as any more professional than using first-person. Also check for typos - came across 'sub sewer reneder' pretty quickly, and the typo detracts from the otherwise nice work.

Also, some of the PSP in-game shots can be a little hard to discern the quality of the work - I'd use screengrabs wherever possible, as opposed to product shots.

Not trying to be an asshole or anything.

kodde

1) Hardware render should render pretty much the same thing you see in your viewport. You could look into using a CGFX shader in Maya or Marmoset Toolbag to render your art in a game-engine true look.

2) How did you create your normal map? Could be one of the color channels in the Nmap that does not correspond to the way Maya reads normal maps.

hijak

The flipping normal maps can depend on your maya version. For example in maya 8 and below if you had a model with a normal map and you inverse scaled it, you would end up with an inverted surface normal on that object.
However in later version, im on version 9 this does not happen and the view port will allow you to do neagative scaling without the surface normals read from the normal map flipping. However, if you where to render this in metnal ray ive noticed it still flips them. So the viewport is actually the most accurate here, since its hardware rendered. It has something to do with uv space normals or something, i catn quite remember but its somethign that used to happen all the time in games so your programmers would write tools to make sure it treated mirrored geo as normal on export.

Dallas Robinson

danshewan wrote: »

Hey Dallas, welcome to polycount.

Aside from the technical issues, I'd lose the third-person artist's bio from your site - it sounds really pretentious, and doesn't come off as any more professional than using first-person. Also check for typos - came across 'sub sewer reneder' pretty quickly, and the typo detracts from the otherwise nice work.

Also, some of the PSP in-game shots can be a little hard to discern the quality of the work - I'd use screengrabs wherever possible, as opposed to product shots.

Not trying to be an asshole or anything.

Oh Cool! thanks for actually looking at it. I'm not perfect so It's nice to get another set of eyes on it. Yeah spelling is not my strong suit so i'll go back over that more carefully. Putting the Bio in first person is no problem as well. However the screen shots have to stay, the problem is... those ARE screen shots straight from the PSP devkit. Trust me, other people have pointed out the same thing. You just can't get a picture larger then the PSP's screen itself. as far as i know it's just the limit of the hardware. I do have some Maya screen grabs but since the PSP is a portable system they look really blocky when you see them up close.

thanks for taking the time to reply!

Junkie_XL

Welcome. Maybe we could learn from each other. You'd like to know more about next-gen/current-gen techniques. I like to inquire on any and all tuts I can on traditional texturing...which you seem to have a nice grasp on in your portfolio. I'm sure I'm not alone. I've mostly focused my career on high-poly modeling.

bgoodsell

To echo other statements, how are you generating your normal maps? Are you using maya's transfer maps or another program?

Dallas Robinson

bgoodsell wrote: »

To echo other statements, how are you generating your normal maps? Are you using maya's transfer maps or another program?

I actually don't do that. my method is kinda weird. I actually have a shader that was original intended as a "Depth of Field" shader. I use that to generate a high poly height map from the top view perspective camera. then i take that into Crazy bump and have it make the normal map and all the other stuff i need.

So far i use this system for textures I know need to tile or can be used on lots of different things. it obviously doesn't work on stuff that needs more detailed UV's or UV unwrapping.

lately, i've been fooling around with using the same technique in Zbrush since it works in 2 1/2 D and can also make a height map. I find modeling in Maya is better for hard edged normal maps like metal panels while z brush is better for organic stuff like rocks and bark.

for someone who is more of a 'paint' kinda guy this way is way easier to work with if a little ass backwards X-D

kodde

Well you should be aware that different software can differ in interpretation of normal maps. This might the reason you get the inverted issue you mentioned.

If I was you I'd give Maya's Transfer Maps a go if you have a low+high poly model, or why not try xNormal?