baking normals help???
]I am a 60 year old granny, with extensive fine art background, trying to teach myself 3D sculpting, oh my aching brain! Being a very visual thinker, it is difficult to learn from wikis full of words, reading all those technical terms that just bounce off the front of my forehead.
Using Zbrush and Blender, obviously not the ideal marriage of software, but it's what I've got.
LOVE Zbrush, and have made rapid progress there, and can also build very good low poly models in Blender. Anatomy is my strong point, I want to specialize in realistic animals, especially horses, since there don't seem to be many of those offered online.
But... all I can send potential clients are Zproject files, because figuring out how to bake normals in Blender is driving me nuts, and am having trouble reading Xnormal instructions because I don't even know what they are saying.
Please don't just tell me to read more tutorials? What I'd like are books with pictures, I learn very fast from pictures, and books are much easier to read than scrolling endless wiki pages. Any suggestions for good book titles?
That said, it's a blast modeling without making big messes with clay, and gratifying to know I'll never need paper nor run out of colours again.
Thanks for this excellent forum, and thanks for any help you can offer.
Using Zbrush and Blender, obviously not the ideal marriage of software, but it's what I've got.
LOVE Zbrush, and have made rapid progress there, and can also build very good low poly models in Blender. Anatomy is my strong point, I want to specialize in realistic animals, especially horses, since there don't seem to be many of those offered online.
But... all I can send potential clients are Zproject files, because figuring out how to bake normals in Blender is driving me nuts, and am having trouble reading Xnormal instructions because I don't even know what they are saying.
Please don't just tell me to read more tutorials? What I'd like are books with pictures, I learn very fast from pictures, and books are much easier to read than scrolling endless wiki pages. Any suggestions for good book titles?
That said, it's a blast modeling without making big messes with clay, and gratifying to know I'll never need paper nor run out of colours again.
Thanks for this excellent forum, and thanks for any help you can offer.
Replies
This guys tutorial might help, [ame="
Some other good webpages for video tutorials are,
http://cgcookie.com/blender
http://www.blenderguru.com/
and of course, youtube.
I haven't gone though it totally and its a text tutorial but this looks good too.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/06/30/normal_maps_blender_2_5/
I personally like to use xNormal from http://www.xnormal.net/Downloads.aspx
I just installed that program and then you save your high poly sculpt out as an OBJ file and load it into xNormal in the top right button. Then you can load your low poly unwrapped version in the button just below that and then on the 3rd button down you can play around with setting as to how sharp the image will be and what texture size it will render to including how to use plus and minor drop down boxes to say flip the green channel.
Rendering is pretty simple when all that's done, just press the big red button on the bottom and it should save as a BMP where you set the destination folder in the setting menu.
Hope that helps, it can be a lot to take in at first, failing this I would also recommend those video tutorials or check if you have any good local library that might have tutorials books on 3d and texturing, university libraries are probably the best for those subjects.
What exactly do you have trouble with? You seem to have come quite far already by yourself, so i think you can really pull through this if you just keep at it. Are the video's not sufficient ?
Personally i'd advise you to try and get to the bottom of Xnormal, it's a dedicated application that really isn't so difficult.
Also, if you have trouble with terms/buttons; ask us specifically and write down what they mean/do.
For normal maps, to bake the high poly details to a texture to use on the low poly mesh, I use xNormal, a free program which produces good results. Export an Obj file of your low poly (already UV'd) mesh and another of the high poly you would like to bake the details from. You bring each into xNormal, check off the maps you would like to produce, set things like if you want the y flipped or not (you can always invert the green channel in photoshop if it is incorrect), and bake out the textures to whichever location you set. If you would like a more in depth look at xNormal, Eat3d has a free vid which visually goes into many other aspects.
Blender can be tricky with normal maps because depending on your viewport settings you may not see them. Applying them is pretty similar to applying any other texture except you specify it's a normal map (it should pretty easy to find info/training/tuts/vids on the subject).
If you have any questions or any technical terms/topics you would like info on or a explanation of then just message me. The hard part is done if you're already doing what you're doing; no need to be dependent on someone else for the other things
If you're already using ZBrush and your final goal is to get concept pieces/renders of your high poly work, then I'd suggest considering using ZBrush which has had its rendering overhauled in the past few updates. It'd be the fastest and most straight-forward way if you are just trying to produce rendered pieces (and not low-poly meshes to use in a game or something).