Week 15 - Normal Maps and Baking

 

Week 15 - Normal Maps and Baking

What Have I Learned This Week?

This week we learned about using our UV mapping skills to produce Normal Maps from Baking our models. A normal map is built from the UV map, if the UV is unwrapped poorly then the normal map will most likely come out undesired. A normal map is an image of a meshes texture that creates detail on the surface. This is used in the 3D industry as 3D assets can have too much detail to be in a game engine due to limited polycount. A normal map texture creates the desired detail of an asset with an optimised and smaller polycount. Normals use RGB information in 2D and translate it into 3D  by telling the 3D programme the orientation of the surface normals and how the mesh should be shaded.

This week, we were tasked with creating a couch model and using everything we've learned so far to bake and produce a normal map. I started by making a simple couch model, bevelling the edges of the pillows and body to create reinforced edges for smoothing.



After smoothing, I used a noise deform by displacing the vertices of the model in a motion that creates the appearance of couch and pillow ripples.




My first mistake was my retop model. I misunderstood how normal maps work and made a too blocky and simplistic retop model compared to the smoothed source mesh.


I redid the retop, this time I made sure to keep a resemblance of the source mesh in my retop so that the bake can produce a normal map texture correctly on the retop. 


This time when I UV unwrapped I made sure that I layed out my UVs properly and completely filled the map space. However, next time I'd make sure to space out more of the UVs as some are still too close. 


Once I unwrapped the Retop model, I was able to start baking. On Maya, a normal map is created using Transfer Map Editor found in Lighting/Shading > Transfer Maps. The retop model will be the target mesh that will have the Normal Map texture. The smoothed high poly model will be the source that creates the map, this model does not need to be Unwrapped. To make sure every part of the model is baked, the search envelope should be increased. As long as this envelope completely covers the mesh then everything will be baked.






The yellow on a normal map can be produced from clipping meshes, but as these parts will not be seen they are not a huge problem.

Soft Edges

One big mistake I made for the couch was that I did not covert the model into soft edges before baking the mesh. We want the bevels and edges of the couch to be smooth rather than sharp.


Mesh with Soft Edges after Bake.


Explode Baking (Best Results)

Explode Baking is to separate all parts of the mesh model so that there's no clipping. This will result in a cleaner Normal without the orange colours that are caused by clipping.





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