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Baking detail into a low poly model from a hi res

Sage
polycounter lvl 19
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Sage polycounter lvl 19
I was wondering if there is a good way to bake in the detail from a high res model to low poly one. I'm not refering to normal mapping. Let say you model a hi poly tank, with the intention of using it to generate the texture of a low poly model. You take the time to model the bevels so it catches the highlights and all that other good stuff. Then you texture it with shaders and bitmaps. I'm wondering what is a good way to use this to create the texture of the low poly model? Can the render to texture feature in max for example output this information to a low poly model? Thanks in advance.

Alex

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  • MoP
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    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Yeah, that's exactly what Max7's Projection settings in Render to Texture feature is for. You can't do it in Max6, unless you want to spend ages setting up the highpoly object's UV's to perfectly match the lowpoly mesh.

    It's dead easy in Max7 though, once you have your two models (untextured, UV-mapped lowpoly mesh, and a textured/lit highpoly model) you just apply a Projection modifier to the lowpoly mesh, go to the Render to Texture window, and tell it to render a CompleteMap. That will get all the texture, lighting and shadow information from the highpoly model.

    However, if you have mirrored or stacked UV's on the lowpoly mesh, the render might not come out properly - you can move duplicate UV's off to the side of the UV map square when rendering though, and put them back afterwards and that usually works.

    It's basically set up exactly the same way as normal mapping, but you render a CompleteMap instead of a NormalsMap. You could even render out fullbright textures, or just a shadow map by itself to overlay on a painted texture. I use that quite a lot, it's useful.

    So yeah, that's definitely possible (even easy!) in Max7. You might be able to use ORB or some other normalmapping program to render textures, but I doubt it'd be as effective or full-featured as the Max7 renderer.

    MoP
  • poopinmymouth
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    poopinmymouth polycounter lvl 19
    You can also do that same process in max 6 if you get Kaldera.
  • hawken
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    hawken polycounter lvl 19
    I was going to say, what's the best plugin for max 6 and lower?

    Also, I remember something for max4 that baked light onto a map but can't for the life of me remember what it was called. You could probably use this.
  • Eric Chadwick
    I like Kaldera a lot, we use it here in max5 for most things, including baking various maps (color, specular, self-illum, etc.), extracting height maps, and extracting normal maps.

    It does have some problems though, you can't use external renderers with it, ala Brazil or finalRender. It doesn't bake specular directly, you have to move the maps to another material channel like diffuse. It doesn't like any anti-aliasing filter except Area. Also it isn't free... well, we got it free for beta-testing, but that doesn't count.

    But I would recommend buying it anyhow, it's very powerful. The object/matID/UV filter options are great, and the cage mesh is cool too, basically the same thing as max7's projection modifier.
  • JonMurphy
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    JonMurphy polycounter lvl 18
    Hawken, I think that might be Luminaire, but the plgin has dropped off the face of the net, now.

    I was going to try it again, seeing as MAX 5's render to texture got borked by SP2
  • TechSmith
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    TechSmith polycounter lvl 18
    Hey Eric, does kaldera still work with Max5 after SP2 was indstalled? I still have my beta version, but I haven't installed it on the rebuild yet.
  • Eric Chadwick
    I'm in Win2k, works fine here with latest SP.

    Not sure about XP...
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    Oh, there was a fix put out by discreet that fixes the XP SP2 breaking the built in Max render to texture. I saw it on the discreet support site a few days ago.
  • TechSmith
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    TechSmith polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks Rick! I just went and searched the support forums. I found a file called mxsactivex.dlx. Is that the one you're talking about?
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    Yup, thats the one.
  • TechSmith
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    TechSmith polycounter lvl 18
    WOOT WOOT!! HAPPY DANCE!!! YAY!! crazy.gif
  • oXYnary
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    oXYnary polycounter lvl 18
    Gotta say Mop, when you mentioned that before and I tried that. It's a godsend. It helps me get some basic tetures spaces going. One FYI I would remember is to do a uvw unwrap (if your only doing this to capture some basic max shaders) and let it auto unwrap on the high.

    I forgot to do this last time and had some streaking.
  • Fordy
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    Fordy polycounter lvl 18
    I have searched the Max support forums and cant find any reference to a file called mxsactivex.dlx. I daren't install SP2 without it. Can somone point me in thwe right direction please?
  • TechSmith
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    TechSmith polycounter lvl 18
    Sorry, my fault. I misspelled the file name. It's msactivex.dlx. I found it by doing a forum search using the terms render texture XP. I should have bookmarked the download page but I forgot to. The file does work and I can do RTT again.
  • Fordy
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    Fordy polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks Techsmith, I have it now and will attempt the SP2 upgrade with a little less worry. Cheers!
  • sinistergfx
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    sinistergfx polycounter lvl 18
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