Question on Technique

Psiward

Hello every.

I'm looking to get some views on how others would approach going from a high poly to low poly floor grate such as this floor grate.

What I tried was baking my highpoly to a single poly normal map but I'm not convinced of the sense of depth I'm getting between the metal.

ZacD

here's really no good simple solution for something that deep, parallax mapping can help, but honestly you are better off pretending its thin, or modeling it all out.

Goeddy

just model this, its realy no big deal. even if you had technical limitations you just could make a flat lod with a baked normal wich would trigger at a realy far distance.

Dan!

edit: spammers posted in this thread.

nightshade

if polycount is a huge deal then you could do 5 or 6 planes with an alpha for the square holes and stack them on top of each other mimicking the actual object. its the same way they do 3d fur for games. normals help too.

Psiward

Thanks very much for the info. Gave me options to ponder and try

tigg

If you have UDK there are some great materials that use the BumpOffset node to fake depth like this. It works because there is something behind the grating, if there wasn't then the fake depth would be really obvious.

The materials are things like gratings with pipes and wires behind them, I can't remember the material names.