An Introduction to Baked Normals

[Nekronom]

While reading through IS's blender tutorial earlier today, It struck me that it was the perfect opportunity to write a tutorial on baked normals and there advantages. So here we go, Hold on to your hats everyone.

Requirements:

3ds max, blender, or other 3d modeling program.

Skill Level: Easy

Time to Complete: 5-10 minutes.

So we start off with two cubes:

IS's (IS Variant) standing at 113:

and the other method brought up in the thread (tri box), standing at 76polys:

From here, we see the differences in Sub-D on each one.

Notice all the nice edges in this one.

and while this one looks vey similar, notice the excessive warping and pinching in the wireframe and on the corners.

Here we have a quick Uv map as well as smoothing groups layed according to the uvw islands. This is CRUCIAL, If the smoothing groups do not line up with the islands, you will get blatant seams!

In this image we can see the "cage"(blue wireframe) being setup to encompass the High poly model so the textures will be captured correctly

Notice The box on the left(Tri box), appears with an Ambient Occlusion texture, and normal map baked from the correct Sub-D mesh (IS Variant)

Edited June 29, 2011 by Nekronom

[Meo]

I salute your effort Nekronom and im sorry if this comes out the wrong way, but this looks more like an image gallery than a tutorial. Without detailed steps, a novice would find it very hard to replicate your process. I suggest you stick to one application and describe in details each step it takes to achieve baked textures.

[DarkRider]

I love the pics, lots help but as a novice, yeah I'm lost. Need more explanations between pics. but it's a great start!

[_echo]

Yeah, I got nothing out of this for Blender. Its hard to do cross platform tutorials if you dont explain the differencess in process for each, at which point it would be easier to do individual programs. Im a visual person, but this is too much visual.

I feel like I was so negative typing this...