How do I know what should be normal mapped/baked in an environment?
polycounter lvl 10
I want to create a near future sci-fi city environment.
I assume walls, side walks, roads, and anything "blocky" won't require a normal map baked from a high res mesh.
But what about street lights? Fire hydrants? guard rails? manholes? display kiosks?
This may sound like splitting hairs, but doesn't EVERYTHING look better with normals baked from a high res mesh?
I just see making so many high res meshes, especially if there's a lot of pieces/props, retopologizing and texturing them would take so long it would be maddening, especially modular assets (guard rails, stairs etc.) which are the same them only at different sizes, lengths, heights etc.
Am I just overthinking this? Should I create as much of the environment that I can get away with just flat?
If so, what should I bake?
Here are some examples of the look I'm aiming for:
I assume walls, side walks, roads, and anything "blocky" won't require a normal map baked from a high res mesh.
But what about street lights? Fire hydrants? guard rails? manholes? display kiosks?
This may sound like splitting hairs, but doesn't EVERYTHING look better with normals baked from a high res mesh?
I just see making so many high res meshes, especially if there's a lot of pieces/props, retopologizing and texturing them would take so long it would be maddening, especially modular assets (guard rails, stairs etc.) which are the same them only at different sizes, lengths, heights etc.
Am I just overthinking this? Should I create as much of the environment that I can get away with just flat?
If so, what should I bake?
Here are some examples of the look I'm aiming for:
Replies
It's something that you will need to learn to make judgement calls on. Even if this scene is intended to be a portfolio piece only and you can afford to bake unique high res maps for every asset in the scene, like you said, doing the whole process on every single prop will take a lot of time and you need to decide if you really want to spend your time baking every little asset in the scene.
It's easier when you think of a normal map as bump map detail.
It was always intended to fake lighting detail that would otherwise require millions of polygons to do. Since games don't have the same luxury as Hollywood Movies to throw around millions of polygons in real time, normal maps are your best bet for giving your assets high quality surface detail. Otherwise, even if you you end up using other PBR maps like roughness and diffuse, your props will still have that "ultra shiny toy look" instead of the more true to life "uneven and bumpy detail" found on every surface.
Above, the sphere has the same polygon count. But the bump map fakes it so you achieve higher frequency detail without actually increasing the geometry.
And you mentioned ordinary props like Fire Hydrants. Yeah, that stuff requires bump/normal maps too. Go up close and you'll observe all the surface is not the same. Paint is chipping off or the metal is exposed. Both effect how bumpy the overall material is.
I always assumed you would still use a high poly even if you wanted a tiling surface like a wall. It just seems more accurate in practice, unless the goal is to create an entire environment procedurally.
I had been developing an environment that was 95% hand sculpted, and the other 5% were procedurally driven. I'll look into changing this in the future.
As a general rule, a workflow that allows you the greatest ability to make changes quickly and easily is good. You may make a really nice hydrant by sculpting in zbrush, but you can make 50 unique hydrants in half the time with a few procedural materials and mask that might still hit your target visual quality. I think its important to practice both the high poly sculpting/baking workflow and other means so that you can understand the pro's and con's of both methods. Just different tools in the toolbelt.
How much of a given environment contains customized, sculpted assets versus assets relying on other less time consuming means for detail probably depends on how many artist are available to work on the environment, what the target visual aesthetic is, how much money and time there is, etc. I'd expect being able to do the most with the least is a good skill to have, aside from just being able to sculpt beautiful masterpieces.
I'm just really caught up with attention to detail that even spending a lot of time hand sculpting a single asset to match a reference completely just feels more worth it and a lot of fun, than generating a bunch of masks and presets and customizing as you go along.
But I can see this type of method might prove too expensive in the workplace so I'll keep this level of detail for personal projects.
Sculpt organic assets, and characters, it makes sense to have a unique normal map for these, but shader tricks are still used very often. A huge rock for example. Instead of having all unique textures, you have one baked normal and multiple tiling textures.
Anything hard surface can be done using the techniques mentioned above, and in a bigger scope, its usually cheaper to have them like that because you cut down a huge amount of video memory by using those tiling textures, masks, more polygons instead of everything baked, etc. There might be some examples where modeling the most of the things out would be too highpoly but you can always use a good mixture.
Setting these up can still take a lot of time but the reusability compensates.
Generally speaking in environment art, the alternative to baking out a high poly asset is not “procedural”. As @musashidan pointed out in his (not exhaustive) list of techniques, these all require a deft and highly manual touch. “A bunch of masks and presets” is a generalisation so weak as to be completely irrelevant at best, offensive at worst.
Of course there are ways of procedurally generating environments, where the procedural nature is at the very core. None of these are being discussed here
Anyway, the point is, all of the individual enviro props work together to serve a purpose. Individually they are pretty low quality, but altogether they make a masterpiece. Average player isn't sitting there observing single trees. They see a scene as a whole.
Hopefully nobody was offended by my poor classification.
Ok, you've said what is wrong, but you didn't say what is right. What, if anything, do you call the common, modern methods of modeling and texturing that do not involve baking from sculpts?
Props are usually high detail/loddable&reusable, unique geometry is usually none of those things.
You'll tend to do unique bakes for the props because you get a lot of benefit for the time/resource investment (they're scattered all over the place and you only pay once)
Unique geometry will tend to use tileable materials because if the geometry is used only once, the only way you can reuse resources is in textures.