Map Baking Question
Alright, so texturing and laying out UVs isn't a problem for me, but I'm a little lost about the workflow when it comes to importing the low-poly into zbrush for creating the details for the normal maps.
The obvious problem with that is you can't subdivide the entire model at once efficiently most of the time, because it won't be dense enough to paint over (I know, most of you already know this). It would make more sense to export the model in different parts, and subdivide them that way.
Well that's what I want to do. But then I would be baking the normals in zbrush in multiple parts. What's the best way of putting all the normal map fragments together? I feel like I'd be hurting the map somehow by trying to piece multiple maps together.
The obvious problem with that is you can't subdivide the entire model at once efficiently most of the time, because it won't be dense enough to paint over (I know, most of you already know this). It would make more sense to export the model in different parts, and subdivide them that way.
Well that's what I want to do. But then I would be baking the normals in zbrush in multiple parts. What's the best way of putting all the normal map fragments together? I feel like I'd be hurting the map somehow by trying to piece multiple maps together.
Replies
http://www.planetinaction.com/software/ncombiner.htm
It properly combines normals without you having to do any funky channel editing or manual layer masking. This software also lets you combine a noise normal map with your regular normal map for when you need to give a specific section of your UVs some sort of detail, like scratches, scales, bumps, etc.
Note that if you have texture bleeding such as how xNormal does it, this software may not properly combine everything due to the bleeds overlapping tightly packed UVs.
Personally I just manually load all the parts of my normal map into a single Photoshop document then mask out each part. I do this because I can recycle my masks for the other maps I bake using xNormal (AO, convexity, height, etc.) which lets me quickly assemble those.