Replace Polygons / triangles with Normal Maps ?
Hi @ all
I'm looking for some help / answers for creating more details with the help of normal maps.
In the last months we have created many beautiful buildings for our game, but for now there are very Polygon / Triangles intensive, so we are looking for a good way to reduce the Polygons / Triangles and replace them with notmal maps.
The problem that we have is, that the most buildings with frames and glass facades are using no real textures or uvw mapping. They have just simple dedicated materials on them like reflecting glass or a simple reflecting color, which looks really good within the engines.
So the question is, what is the best and also efficiently way to replace all the frames and details with normal maps?
Please take a look at the attached pictures, there are two samples...
For the first one we didn't want to create just a simple texture with black lines for the frames, the black areas should have some deepnss, without extruding them inside and creating new Polygons / triangles.
The same question for sample picture two...
I'm looking for some help / answers for creating more details with the help of normal maps.
In the last months we have created many beautiful buildings for our game, but for now there are very Polygon / Triangles intensive, so we are looking for a good way to reduce the Polygons / Triangles and replace them with notmal maps.
The problem that we have is, that the most buildings with frames and glass facades are using no real textures or uvw mapping. They have just simple dedicated materials on them like reflecting glass or a simple reflecting color, which looks really good within the engines.
So the question is, what is the best and also efficiently way to replace all the frames and details with normal maps?
Please take a look at the attached pictures, there are two samples...
For the first one we didn't want to create just a simple texture with black lines for the frames, the black areas should have some deepnss, without extruding them inside and creating new Polygons / triangles.
The same question for sample picture two...
Replies
For the first one, I would say creating height map in PS and converting that into normal map is the fastest way.
For the second one, creating one window and baking it, then copy that bake/low-poly version (depends on LOD).
Is there maybe some good tutorial for creating / backing textures for buildings ?
For buildings you don't need to bake everything, generating normal maps with crazybump or nDo2 can work really well.
@ZacD Thats my problem, creating a normal map for a 40 floor high building isn't that easy... for me right now...