Baking process

When embarking on the baking process there is a lot of caveats and ways to go about baking, in today’s lesson we went through these processes one by one so that we could fully understand the process and help to increase our professional work flow for future projects.

Normal Concept

The first thing we learnt about normal maps is that they are made up of the colours RGB and this is what give them their distinctive look, this directly translates to the directions of X,Y and Z in Maya which are coloured red, green and blue.

First when beginning the modelling process I had to look to try and discern what details can be done with modelling and what can be done with normal maps, the most basic rule is that you can only bake details onto geometry that’s there in the first place and that the normal map will not provide the model with extra geometry, this means that you can bake details into surfaces like screws and panels etc. but not create brand new geometry like an indent with a pipe going through for example.

Detail Scale

The next process we looked at was detail scale and this is geometry that is too small to see at distance even though its realistic it will be hard to see in the game world this means that details must be exaggerated so that they are visible and the fine details are shown otherwise the work gone into modelling certain pieces of detail in geometry will be worthless.

Projection

Projection is the process of making your normal’s show because if details are on a 90⁰ angle then the normal map will not show it as bumped, this is because the normal projects its bake on orthographic properties so if the geometry is on a tangent with the direction of the bake then the vertices on top will hide the lower one giving the illusion there is no bump so to fix this or avoid it you must make sure that your extrusions are not on 90⁰ angles.

Kit Bash

One of the quickest ways to get details on to a piece of geometry is to create a kit bash which is a collection of geometry that can be easily placed on the basic model and then baked over to give high detail and increase the speed of the modelling the process.

Grids

When it comes to the creation of grids for normal maps one of the easiest process for creation is to make one section of the pattern to then duplicate and weld on and keep doing this until you fill a row of length in which you happy with, once this is done you can then duplicate the rows and weld them in to column’s so that you can eventually make grids or chain link fences etc. this process is defiantly on I will be using in the future because when it came to doing geometry like that I usually spent a lot of time hand making each section with this the time will be sliced and will be more accurate.

Normal Bakes

When beginning the normal baking process you should already have a Low poly model and a high Poly model that conform to the rules and caveats of the baking process, Once you have this you’re ready to bake you first need to move you low poly model to the centre of the world, we do this so that Maya has an easier time of trying to bake the details down, then you select the low poly model and you freeze transformations and delete all the history on the object because all we want is the object with a material on it for exporting to the game engine of our choice in this case it is UE4. Once this is done you move your high poly in the same fashion to exactly the same spot and then select your low poly again and go to transfer maps in the rendering drop down menu this will open channel box that looks like this

Within this box you must make your low poly the target mesh and the high poly the source mesh so you get the detail on the high poly to you low poly, there is a lot of option in the box but all we want for this is the normal map option and you can change the options at the bottom all depending on the bake result you want once these are chosen you can then select bake and close and wit for it to do its job on completion you will have a normal map result on your low poly mesh.