Im entering a mini contest tomorrow, They have asked for something I find odd. They want to see a high to low poly process yet they are only allowing a diffuse map to be used? Is there a workflow I can keep as much detail as possible and bake it into a diffuse map?
Yeah, bit weird. But still possible, grab your normal map, go to channels, select and copy the green channel. Now paste this onto a layer on top of your diffuse map, set it to Overlay and bring the opacity to around 20%, or tweak it to whatever looks best.
Generally for that sort of thing you would bake a directional light map (some might refer to it as a point light map) from the highpoly down to the low to use as your base lighting for your diffuse texture. That is a bit odd though, that a high poly would be required for a contest without normal maps. Try this thread:…
Aw shucks, that's my guy. :> Here's some detail on the layer setup. Not sure exactly why I used both a WSN and pRTP with different blending modes. The way I usually do it now is roughly this: Cavity/Curvature - Overlay Green Channel of WSN - Soft Light or Overlay at 50% opacity Ambient Occlusion - Multiply at 50% Base…
I haven't tried that PRTP method yet. It looks good. But I have gotten very nice results doing an AO bake in xNormal, along with a Cavity map bake in XNormal. Then I take those 2 and Overlay them in potatoshop :-) onto the diffuse and playing with the opacity until it got me the look I wanted. To make it really pop, try…