Introduction to Normal Mapping - Video Tutorial

[-HP-]

Hey guys.

I found this really awesome video tutorial made by Tyler Wanlass, I've learn't a lot with it and I recommend everyone who's starting out with learning the in depths of normal mapping and texturing for current gen games, to check this ones out.

Here's the URL: http://www.tylerwanlass.com/tutorials.cfm

And direct links, Intro to normal mapping part 1 (3ds Max) | Intro to normal mapping part 2 (3ds Max, Photoshop, Crazybump)

[PhilipK]

Pretty nice and easy to understand I'd say. However I'm not a fan of how he used a totally smoothed lowpoly like that on the gas tank prop. When baking that the normal map will counteract the actual smoothing as you obviously want that thing to have hard faces. By having it smoothed like that makes him able to stitch the whole uv and save the little extra space having each hard face separated would. Still, especially when overlaying more stuff like that (and he also didn't greyscale the blue channel when overlaying messing that channel up but that's usually no biggie anymore), it might get some very ugly convex or concave shading ingame depending on the engine. I only tend to keep stuff smoothed like that on organic stuff.

But whenever working with constructed hard faced stuff it's always better to also keep the lowpoly hard and split the uv shells OR even better keep the lowpoly smooth but have support edges around all edges that should be "hard" just like the highpoly but that's obviously also more expensive

Was kinda hard to explain what I mean but I hope some of that made any sense...

[Minos]

Pretty nice and easy to understand I'd say. However I'm not a fan of how he used a totally smoothed lowpoly like that on the gas tank prop. When baking that the normal map will counteract the actual smoothing as you obviously want that thing to have hard faces. By having it smoothed like that makes him able to stitch the whole uv and save the little extra space having each hard face separated would. Still, especially when overlaying more stuff like that (and he also didn't greyscale the blue channel when overlaying messing that channel up but that's usually no biggie anymore), it might get some very ugly convex or concave shading ingame depending on the engine. I only tend to keep stuff smoothed like that on organic stuff.

Yes I know what you mean. I never really understood why people smooth the entire low poly model prior to baking the normals. That always resulted in bad looking normal maps for me. Of course it works for organic stuff, but for hard edges it's better to keep smoothing groups nicer or chamfer soem edges like you said.

But whenever working with constructed hard faced stuff it's always better to also keep the lowpoly hard and split the uv shells OR even better keep the lowpoly smooth but have support edges around all edges that should be "hard" just like the highpoly but that's obviously also more expensive

Yes. That's why those crates in Doom 3 look so weird

[PhilipK]

Yeah. You just always want the lowpoly to look as similar as possible to the highpoly and that should apply to the smoothing as well.

Didn't really see that on the doom3 crates tho

Overall I thought the content in d3 was very well done compared to most other games.

Just took a look at UT3 some time ago and saw so many shitty smoothing errors... just big black triangles all over the place. You'd think they should be able to model properly with all those models and shit they use in the maps.

[Minos]

Yeah. You just always want the lowpoly to look as similar as possible to the highpoly and that should apply to the smoothing as well.

Didn't really see that on the doom3 crates tho

Overall I thought the content in d3 was very well done compared to most other games.

Some crates are just 6 sided boxes with normal maps baked from a box with chamfered edges. I couldn't see the reason of sacrificing the look to save 12 polys only

But yeah, I agree that the art in d3 is really well done, not questioning that

[Psyshokiller]

Those boxy crates are brushes, that might be the reason why they're not chamfered. It would have been possible ofc but texturing them would have taken a little longer, since you can't treat multiple faces as one, like in hammer, which means sacrificing flexibility. Using a model would have added to the drawcount if not "inlined" (turning models to bsp at dmap). This would also cut back on flexibilty since you can't scale models with Doom3.

Maybe that's the reason or they just we're lazy.

[Minos]

Those boxy crates are brushes, that might be the reason why they're not chamfered. It would have been possible ofc but texturing them would have taken a little longer, since you can't treat multiple faces as one, like in hammer, which means sacrificing flexibility. Using a model would have added to the drawcount if not "inlined" (turning models to bsp at dmap). This would also cut back on flexibilty since you can't scale models with Doom3.

Maybe that's the reason or they just we're lazy.

doom3 editing sounds like hell

[Psyshokiller]

Kinda fitting it's title.