Baking vs Painting
Hey guys,
So I am making a hanging wall-lamp, and I want it to have lots of detail via the normal map. So my question is, what is better? Sculpting a high-poly, doing retopo, and baking, or painting the normal map in Ndo2/Photoshop? It seems for this painting the normal map would be way faster, and I can use vectors etc., but I always see people doing bakes, not painting normals. What should I do?
I painted where most of the detail would go.
So I am making a hanging wall-lamp, and I want it to have lots of detail via the normal map. So my question is, what is better? Sculpting a high-poly, doing retopo, and baking, or painting the normal map in Ndo2/Photoshop? It seems for this painting the normal map would be way faster, and I can use vectors etc., but I always see people doing bakes, not painting normals. What should I do?
I painted where most of the detail would go.
Replies
Both
I would do this with sub-d modeling.
I don't quite understand...if you make a high-poly sub-d model, you need a low poly one to bake too...so how do you do that without retopo?
Oh and one other thing. I don't understand why I should be doing sub-d modeling for this. If I want to keep my edges really sharp, then why would I sub-d?
http://wiki.polycount.com/SubdivisionSurfaceModeling
Alliteratively to painting a height map, there is a free trial of nDo2
It looks like you don't know the difference between a high-p model and a low poly model.It doesn't matter really how much edge loops/polys you got on you subd model as long as you have good topology and desired look.Subd model is used to bake the details on the low poly so you should be careful with low-poly model more so that you get good topology,silhouette,low poly count and good baking base.Very sharp edges don't translate onto the normal map really good.
View this video:[ame="
Haha thanks, I just watched that video before you posted it
I understand that the low poly cage can be subdivided up to form the high poly mesh, but the problem with that is I will need to add supporting edges on the low poly base mesh, and that is not really great when I want a low poly hard edge. Anyway, my mesh is low poly enough that I only need to create hand-painted normals, but I actually don't need to do that because it will be viewed from so far away.
Well it turns out that the model I made did not really have anything to be baked down on. Maybe I would have saved 10 polygons, but it would be in the scene 4 times, and saving 40 polygons is kinda useless on desktop. I am going to start using Photoshop to draw a detail normal map with some designs. I will let you all know how it comes out.
Thanks all, for being awesome people with awesome answers.
UDK:
The emissive channel is added to the surface colour without any consideration for lighting, and any pixel with a brightness >1.0 will begin to bloom.
As an added bonus, it allows for faster iteration times since I'm just manipulating layers in Photoshop and not baking the maps over and over again whenever I want to move a screw head.
In a situation like this I would reccomend evaluating the high-poly model before you bake and making changes to the highpoly. Baking to the lowpoly should just be a final step. I only re-bake if I've changed the lowpoly in some way.
However using NDo is sometimes useful as baked in detail doesn't always show up the way you want it to due to texture resolution.