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3 Dimensional Chat / Normal Map Baking

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SamHH
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Joined: 9th Dec 2006
Location: Vermont
Posted: 29th Jan 2009 15:40
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Hi all,
What kind of settings or light setup do you guys use when baking you normal, specular and diffuse maps into a texture?
Thanks,
SamHH


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Oolite
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Location: Middle of the West
Posted: 29th Jan 2009 20:29
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I usually keep it completely free of lights and let the engine take control of that, it really depends on the limitations of your engine at the moment and how you are controlling it within game.

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SamHH
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 17:27
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Well, I am using fpsc. Very limited in the performance department, so I want to bake all the textures I can get away with like the ones in model pack 21.


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Jon Fletcher
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 18:02
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Two lights, one high from the front, and one slightly higher from the back to mimic back lighting:



Thats what i usually went for, but i dont really experiment with lighting very much..

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Crav3
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2009 22:19 Edited at: 3rd Feb 2009 22:20
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That's a nice setup Jon.

Yet I wouldn't add any pre-lit lighting. Basically my technique is just place a skylight in the scene(make sure it's white in the intensity options), Give the object an all white material. Go to render settings in the dialogue set the mode to catmull.Enable Light tracer and set the bias to 500. Then render to texture,and also setting the unwrap channel to 1 (which is your UV). Then when In photoshop set the layer to multiply. This way is similar to Bond1.

The thing about using a pre-lit setup like Jon's is that in game engines that use dynamic lighting will look unrealistic in some way. Think about when the migration will come to FPSC and the lighting will be improved with dynamic lighting. It's better off to start of this way. But yet again, It's all up to choice.

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Jon Fletcher
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Posted: 4th Feb 2009 18:04 Edited at: 4th Feb 2009 18:06
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Quote: "The thing about using a pre-lit setup like Jon's is that in game engines that use dynamic lighting will look unrealistic in some way."


Well obviously.

Thats the whole point of baking it into the texture, its fake and meant solely for ambient lit environments, not dynamic lighting.

Quote: "Basically my technique is just place a skylight in the scene(make sure it's white in the intensity options), Give the object an all white material. Go to render settings in the dialogue set the mode to catmull.Enable Light tracer and set the bias to 500."


I think you just mean Ambient Occlusion, which is something most people would be generating before, for use when making the texture.

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SamHH
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Posted: 4th Feb 2009 21:25
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Yeah, I was just talking about baking in normal map details in a final texture. I wouldn't need to if fpsc was faster, but thats what I'm using right now.


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Crav3
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Posted: 4th Feb 2009 22:16 Edited at: 4th Feb 2009 22:42
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Yeah an AO map looks alot better than pre-lit bake maps because of the nice shadowing. I see your point of having pre-lit because you wanted some highlights. But I would rather stick to the realistic terms.

As for the normals, Basically it's best to create from a high poly source than bake it onto the low poly. That's the way to go now days, The normal map should be a seperate texture sheet.
Although I think handpainting normals hasn't died yet. It's best to pick up a copy of zbrush or mudbox. I'm not sure though what kind of performance hit normal maps has on fpsc though. If you want to learn about specular, fpsc x9 doesn't exactly support specular maps, But if you want to create one, Just greyscale the image and adjust the brightness and contrast of the layers, as well as adding extras to any areas.

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