you decide
I haven't tried cavity maps myself but from the name it maps cavities (duh) and thus you can use them however you like. you could turn it into a glow map so everything glows from the inside. or use it to darken cavities.. hinting on them but not actually needing all the details. kind of like ambient occlusion I guess.
Just to clarify: It's not like a specular or diffuse map, which you use in the engine. It's something people might overlay on their specular and diffuse to make things pop.
A cavity map tends to be more of a small-scale thing, not so much big shapes occluding each other as stuff like wrinkles being picked out.
You can essentially generate a cavity map if you tweak Max / Maya whatever settings to adjust how the ambient occlusion is generated. Zbrush generates them very easily though, and you can kinda get a quick one by fiddling with Crazybump settings over a normalmap.
Edit: Beaten, Jonathan explained it in fewer words.
thanks for all the explanations. I kind of understand it more.
but I have another question. did anybody have an error that says some mapping coordinates are missing for baking normal map in max? everything is all the same material id. I just recently come across this.
- zbrush
- Mental Ray ambient occlusion with a very short ray distance
- render to texture a heightmap from your high detail mesh to a smoothed low detail mesh (a blobby model), then adjust curves in photoshop
- the fabulous xNormal and CrazyBump
I know this is an old thread but I personally use cavity maps to mask out the specular channel. For instance on characters you don't want pores to contain specular highs. If you multiply the cavity in the diffuse channel it should be done so as to not have any black.
I know this is an old thread but I personally use cavity maps to mask out the specular channel. For instance on characters you don't want pores to contain specular highs. If you multiply the cavity in the diffuse channel it should be done so as to not have any black.
Hey, that's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing, gonna try it for myself.
Then tend to be used a fair bit in the newer procedual methods of texture creation and is used to define edges for edgeware etc. Check out you tube for some dDo videos.
So they are just "in between (process) helper" maps... Not like diffuse or albedo or displacement that are actually used in the final rendering being it in real time engine (unreal) or renderer liek Vray? Correct? They are just "helper" maps to help you/speed up/make more easy the creation process of some asset?
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I haven't tried cavity maps myself but from the name it maps cavities (duh) and thus you can use them however you like. you could turn it into a glow map so everything glows from the inside. or use it to darken cavities.. hinting on them but not actually needing all the details. kind of like ambient occlusion I guess.
Ambient occlusion is for larger details (macro-detail)
They're often overlooked, even though they can help sell the form and detail.
You can essentially generate a cavity map if you tweak Max / Maya whatever settings to adjust how the ambient occlusion is generated. Zbrush generates them very easily though, and you can kinda get a quick one by fiddling with Crazybump settings over a normalmap.
Edit: Beaten, Jonathan explained it in fewer words.
http://donaldphan.com/tutorials/xnormal/xnormal_occ.html
Look at his throat. In an AO it is darkened while in a cavity map the.. well.. cavities are darkened.
but I have another question. did anybody have an error that says some mapping coordinates are missing for baking normal map in max? everything is all the same material id. I just recently come across this.
- zbrush
- Mental Ray ambient occlusion with a very short ray distance
- render to texture a heightmap from your high detail mesh to a smoothed low detail mesh (a blobby model), then adjust curves in photoshop
- the fabulous xNormal and CrazyBump
Correct?