Your UVmapping is silly. You've mapped both sides of everything separately when as far as I can tell the model is perfectly symmetrical. You could remap it and go 1024x1024 and still have plenty of detail.
Yo. Been fiddling about, what you did was of great GREAT help PredatorGSR, I optimized the mesh further, used your smoothing group setup and changed my unwrap to work with it, the result was a pretty good AO and NRM bake in max, still some issues on the head but I'm fixing that by splitting it properly. I also exploded the model and will check do some baking in Xnormal to get things right, again, thanks
elitewolverine: yeah I use Max10 No idea how to save to older versions, I believe that's a feature of Max2011
Kitteh: Well aware of it, thing is though: I hate perfect symmetry, I know it's a great way to optimize and save space and all that, but this here is mainly for practice and to give myself a bigger canvas to work with in regards to texture. I feel I can get more personality into an items texture without symmetry than with. And this is being scaled down to 1024x1024 and looks good up close.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
Kitteh: Well aware of it, thing is though: I hate perfect symmetry, I know it's a great way to optimize and save space and all that, but this here is mainly for practice and to give myself a bigger canvas to work with in regards to texture. I feel I can get more personality into an items texture without symmetry than with. And this is being scaled down to 1024x1024 and looks good up close.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
fair point, but in-game or really for any practical purpose, you'll only ever be seeing one side of this at a time, and splitting it up can make for nasty seams at the symmetry lines that you have to work at to get to look smooth, which may also mess w/ your normal map bake
I'm going to just stop this before I end up deleting it. I've fiddled about with the lowpoly, the highpoly, the unwrap and textures and nothing really looks right. When I started this it was my first real attempt at making a HP to LP bake model. I've learned a lot though, and thats really all that matters. The design isn't mine either so I did not want to use it for anything other than practice and I got that.
Anyway, here's a picture.
This is just normal and AO + a color map baked by adding base materials to the highpoly, so no real texturing work here ( I found the unwrap to be a real mess to work with so I just didn't bother putting any real attempt into it.)
Next time I'll keep all steps in mind when creating a high poly as well as doing the unwrap.
So I'm done with this for now, might do my own type of axe thing later, and actually finish it all nice and proper. Seriously grateful for all help given in this thread, I've actually learned more from it than my school taught me
is your high poly mesh smoothed grouped as well? Because your low poly mesh is what is getting its information from the high.
from what i understand in my app, the uv layout of the low poly mesh is just telling the highpoly details where to go. And its from the high poly version that all the smooth groups etc are being created from...hence why you could remove all your smooth groups from your low poly mesh and still get these smooth errors (at least it happens to me that way)
i could show what i mean by using a simple cube. If i took two cubes both even same resolution, made the 'high' cube smoothed, then told it to bake that cube to the 'low' cube that is mapped, i will get a norm map that is trying to smooth all the faces. I think this is what is happening here..
also as a 'quick' fix have you tried making a normal map from your ao map? while its hardly a substitue for the real thing you could use it as a placement version till you get your smoothed groups worked out...
I'm not going to take the time to explain the concepts of normal maps to you, as there is tons of resources all around the site and polycount wiki, but that just isn't really how it works.
Replies
elitewolverine: yeah I use Max10
Kitteh: Well aware of it, thing is though: I hate perfect symmetry, I know it's a great way to optimize and save space and all that, but this here is mainly for practice and to give myself a bigger canvas to work with in regards to texture. I feel I can get more personality into an items texture without symmetry than with. And this is being scaled down to 1024x1024 and looks good up close.
Thanks for the suggestion though.
fair point, but in-game or really for any practical purpose, you'll only ever be seeing one side of this at a time, and splitting it up can make for nasty seams at the symmetry lines that you have to work at to get to look smooth, which may also mess w/ your normal map bake
Anyway, here's a picture.
This is just normal and AO + a color map baked by adding base materials to the highpoly, so no real texturing work here ( I found the unwrap to be a real mess to work with so I just didn't bother putting any real attempt into it.)
Next time I'll keep all steps in mind when creating a high poly as well as doing the unwrap.
So I'm done with this for now, might do my own type of axe thing later, and actually finish it all nice and proper. Seriously grateful for all help given in this thread, I've actually learned more from it than my school taught me
Thanks!
I'm not going to take the time to explain the concepts of normal maps to you, as there is tons of resources all around the site and polycount wiki, but that just isn't really how it works.