Comprehensive Texture Baking

so the purpose of this tutorial is go over texture baking in 3ds Max and X normal also be going over a lot of theory so if you're using a different 3d package other than this that's fine too because a lot of the transfer over but really what I want to focus on is just real-world examples of why your bakes might be coming out whether it be errors or Sack coming out looking the way you figured it would that's what I'm going to be focusing on mostly so it's not going to be necessarily on how just use the baker and Max or just use Excel but an overall view of extra baking in general um I'm also later on in the tutorial I've been going to be using a project I'm working on so we're going to go a little bit beyond just you know looking at a couple boxes and stuff like that but I'll show you a whole workflow from coming out of ZBrush bring it into Max setting up the low poly and doing the bakes and then out to the final render checking for errors all that kind of stuff the first thing I want to talk about is how important it is to line up the low and high poly mesh this might be something you know some people kind of overlook or don't put as much emphasis on as you could but it's absolutely critical that you line up the low and high poly as close as possible so it's kind of like a balancing act between how much geometry should I have my low poly how much should I have and how you know how much time should I spend lining all this stuff stuff up to make sure you know it gives you a proper bake you can think of a baker is sort of like a digital camera in the sense that it only records down what's in front of it it doesn't know one way or another what you're trying to do and it can't really correct its own air so it just simply records down you know what's put in front of it or what's been set up so the first thing I'm going to do actually is press alt W on my keyboard to maximize the viewport kind of get into what these examples are all about here the example on the far left here the red one is an ideal setup it's exactly how you want and everything's lined up perfectly and it would give a great ideal bake the next one here in the middle the blue one is an example where I intentionally kind of skewed out at the ends of the low-poly and the one in the on the far right the screen one here I intentionally skewed out the high poly so this kind of you know three examples of what might happen along the way in your workflow going back to the first one I'm going to grab on to the low poly I'm going to hit alt X on my keyboard to go in x-ray mode we're going to zoom in on the edges because it really was something like this like a hard surface setup like this the edges are what's really critical it's going to it's you know it's kind of what we're looking for us what's gonna give you that nice smooth high poly look on your low poly but if you take notice look how closely and how exact the hypo or the low poly edge is in comparison to the high poly when it's set up like this it's going to give you that nice smooth baked transition across a low poly mesh so when the camera zoomed out it'll give you that that illusion that you know the thing is much more detailed in high poly than it actually is an exam the next example over here and this is what we're this is what you ideally want this is what we're looking for whether it be a hard surface object like this or an again earner or an organic one like a rock or something like that next one over here I intentionally kind of bent up and skew it up the low poly to show you an example of you know let's say we already had a high poly set up and we're building our low and you know I was a little quick with it or whatever and things aren't lining up in a situation like this we're actually not going to record down that smooth transition in the proper location even though your bank will turn out and there won't be any technical errors with it the actual location of that smooth edge transition won't be recorded down in the proper spot as opposed to right over here so if I grab let me grab both of these take note on on the edge of here and on the edge of here the difference so where that smooth edge is actually going to Portadown will be in the wrong spot same goes for this but just for a different reason okay so I went ahead did the bakes and I brought the scene into marmoset toolbag and I just kind of wanted to go over our bacon rendering error issues if you remember back the red one was the one that was properly done and as you can see it looks decent it looks solid the edges are holding up but on the blue one here on this corner over here is where I you know I kind of skewed the low-poly off as as comparison to the high if we come down here on the bottom side you can um you can already see what's going on over here we have this nice smooth transition that high poly look but then if you come over to here where I had skewed it off we actually lose that that smooth transition and that's because the the normal map is actually baked in the wrong location and it's low right you know if I come up here you can actually see where that smooth edge was recorded down which is right here that a dark area that should actually be up along here in depending on the camera angle it gets worse or better but nevertheless it is there and hopefully this gives you an idea as to why it's so important to line up the low and high poly especially on a hard surface object like this anything like a gun or a tank or a vehicle whatever you know stuff like that it's just it's absolutely critical you could have one of the most beautiful looking high Polly's ever but if stuff ain't properly lined up it's just never going to give you the proper breaks that's just it's just kind of the nature of the beast um the next thing I want to go over is smoothing groups with this project here this example I had the smoothing group set to one I know in different applications you know like in max you have smoothing groups and they're all numbered and my is a little bit different but the theory is the same so I'm going to go be going over that next and then we'll be moving on to some more baking stuff okay now that we're back to max I kind of wanted to go over smoothing groups baking and unwrapping and all those kind of all correlate together this isn't overly complicated there's not a lot to know but there are a couple things that you do need to know so your split your workflow goes as smooth as possible but in this scene I have three different examples of smoothing group setups and the first one here basically I don't have any smoothing groups set at all on this mesh on the second one here I the bottom half is set to one and the top half is set to two so you can see there's two different smoothing groups on there you kind of see that hard edge running along there I'm third one I have the entire minutes to actually set to all one smoothing group now in the viewport let me go down here I'll quick kind of show you what's going on if you go to polygons to us smoothing groups you can see everything the entire mesh is set to one in your viewport like this um when it's all set to one it kind of just looks like a big blob on your screen and that's fine and that's how I actually recommend doing baking when it comes to either organic like meshes or a hard surface object like this but that's not to say you can't do multiple smoothing groups on a mesh what when you're using big normals that's that's perfectly fine too and that's really what I wanted to focus on with a section of the tutorial but let me hit alt Q on the keyboard to isolate this and whether or not you use multiple smoothing groups or not it's entirely up to you you know it might depend on what you're doing or whatever but if you are you need to do you need to unwrap the mesh in a certain way if you're brand-new to baking and you've been doing stuff along this way you know you've probably been unwrapping just kind of how you how you needed to or how you see fit or right not but when you're running multiple smoothing groups and you are doing normal mat baking there the mesh has to be unwrapped in a specific way and it's what I mean by that is actually let me just kind of throw an unwrap UVW modifier on here and show you what I have going on now if you remember back I was talking about I had the bottom half on smoothing Group one and the top half on smoothing group two the important part though is to take notice on how I have the UV islands laid out on the bottom half which is smoothing Group one I have the entire UV island separated from the top half or this this section up here on smoothing group - there's nothing welded together they're completely separate and this is how you need to unwrap if you're doing baking with multiple smoothing groups um if you don't do this what happens is you'll end up with a black seam that runs along we're not sorry not a black seen but a black edge where these were these two smoothing groups meet together there's actually absolutely no way to remedy remedy this other than maybe going into Photoshop and trying to paint it out but that's a terrible workflow and it's going to you know it's going to burn up a ton of time and I just totally kill the project off so when you're when you're setting up your low poly and you know you want to use multiple smoothing groups and you're planning on it also plan on separating the UV islands kind of like I have here I know this is a really simple project or a simple example but just keep that in mind as far as the top half goes you can also see I have these separated that's fine this all here was on smoothing group number two is top half and the bottom half and I just have these separated here just so they fit on the UV sheet you know a little better that doesn't really matter so I kind of recap if you have a separation in smoothing groups you have to have a separation on your UV islands but if they're together like it is like these are here you don't have to it doesn't you know you can have it either way so I could have you know for example split this all apart and welded it all down onto here that would be perfectly fine having those two together but that's kind of what I want to go over on this one and with this next step or the next area one to go over is actually optimizing your mesh your low poly for you know real-time use because the examples I've been using so far actually aren't quite optimized and I kind of want to go over that too alright for this next section here I'd like to kind of get into optimizing your mesh before you actually do any unwrapping and baking and really what's involved in that is just getting rid of extra vertices and edges that aren't really needed going back to kind of box modeling 101 you know if if there isn't any if you have any extra vertices or edges that aren't supporting your silhouette there really should be gotten rid of and it's you know basically it comes down to removing edges or welding extra vertices together so kind of to expand on this example from what we've been working on I made it another couple lot of meshes here and extrude it out just a couple things from our original if you look in the viewport and I turn off my edges you can see these two meshes look identical I can do a render they render out identical but the overall footprint for the overall footprint in either a game engine or your viewport it can be literally cut in half this one here is 104 verts and this one here is 52 verts and each of these meshes either one will bake out just fine but is what it comes down to like I was saying before us welding up these extra vertices and getting rid of these extra edges it should be something that you should definitely get used to and do all the time I know some people can they kind of fight you tooth-and-nail about having you know triangles on the mesh you know all it's got to all be quads and this and that but the truth of the matter is you know it doesn't have to be all quads there are a couple cases we're keeping quads helps especially with you know high poly modeling but for your low poly and especially for or like organic software environments you know you you want to strip the mess down to as simple as possible it's easier to unwrap it's easier to deal with and it's a lot less stress on the computer to try to rent you know to try to render out the final scene so as far as going in and doing this um there really isn't I'm just going to go over a couple tools what's what's available in Macs going over to this one here basically it's as literally as simple as for one example is using your target weld tool and just clicking on it and welding something up there is another tool that in Mac's 2012 or later they came out with in the polygon modeling tools I really haven't touched base on this this is the this tab here it comes default right up top on the top of your screen like when you just install an open max if you don't see anything at all if you look right up here make sure this is toggled on it's basically a toggle ribbon if you know if that isn't lit up it you won't it won't show up at all but if you go into the freeform section of this there's a there's a tab or a button here called optimize is what this is a quick way to optimize and strip away extra topology extroverts that you don't need I use all the time it's really quick but you know I'm not going to get too deep into this because that's not really what this tutorial is about but just kind of you know touch base on it basically um you know if you have if you turn the optimized two lon it's a toggle you can see kind of lit up blue and then I why the vertice Wyman's vertex sub-object mode I'm just going to hold down shift and I click and drag up this mesh and it'll start welding up extra vertices that I don't need and this also works with edges there's you know extra options stuff you know for welding up and getting ready edges and stuff like that but that's this is the general idea how you go about doing it you know it's completely up to you and of course Maya or you know another 3d package might work differently but optimize that the whole point is optimizing your low poly mesh before you actually do the unwrap and actually do the baking is it's critical it really is especially if you want to you know do some nice professional work that's not going to dog down on your game or whatever kind of real-time project you might be working on so that pretty much concludes the optimizing mesh part I know it's pretty quick but it would just kind of give you an idea of you know make sure to look for it was the main was the main point of this but the next part I'm going to move on to is actually setting up the cage I'm going to be using max for the example but once again this all kind of transfers to other 3d packages and there's a it's really it's for the most part straightforward but there's a couple of things that I wanted to show you wanted to talk about so you know and you're aware of it but we'll be moving on to that one next so what this next part tutorial I'm going to be talking about quite a few different things the first thing we'll be talking about setting up a cage in Max and some of it will be max specific but also be going over a lot of theory and different things to look for no matter kind of what you what you're working in also be talking about a common baking area and how to remedy that problem using supporting edges I haven't mentioned supporting edges yet but I actually did you know run into a problem with this project here and I'll be showing you what happened what I did to fix it and how to kind of move on from that before we again with all that I'm actually going to talk first about what I have going on here and basically this is a really common if not the most common setup for doing a high poly mesh in a modeling program this is what we have here is a number of different elements that are all kind of brought together to bring you the whole so this is an all box model this is an all one piece one thing I have here too that I haven't had my other in my previous demonstrations is floating geometry and so I kind of wanted to talk about that but basically is what floating geometry is is extra high poly geometry that's floating above the surface of a mesh and there really isn't anything that correlates over to the low poly is what this what we're doing here is we're just straight baking this right into the surface of this cube if you look in the viewport if I kind of zoom in on here you can see that it looks like it was actually almost modeled straightening the surface of here if I do a render you can see that you know it looks like it was part of there and that's also how the Baker itself will see a too so we could take that normal information and bake that right down into the surface of the low-poly over here but I'm also there you know there's a couple different things on how to set up the cage and stuff like when you're using floating geometries you know a couple different things to look for so I wanted to talk about that too well the next thing I want to mention also was baking down geometry that isn't a part of your low poly if you look here kind of see what I got going on here you know we have an area that's been extruded in to the high poly mesh but I really don't have anything over here that is on the low poly mesh and when you you know this really isn't a tutorial on modeling but since I have it all here I might as well mention it anytime you you're going to be doing something like this you want to actually bevel the edges inward just slightly you know same thing if it was extrude it outward you want to kind of taper those in and the reason for that is so we can you know we can give the Baker some normal information on the inside of this this area here we didn't have that is what's going to actually happen it's just going to be sort of a steep drop-off and there won't be really much depth information well we would all really get is that ring you kind of be able to see when I say once we hop over into a tool bag kind of how it ended up and how it looked but you know just kind of be aware of that like I was saying this isn't a high poly modeling demo or anything like that but I just wanted to mention it okay moving on to the cage part of the tutorial here basically what I have in my scene is our initial one the one we were just kind of looking at and over here I have a couple of test bakes um the one in blue is my the first one here that had errors and the red one here is the repaired version like I was saying I'll show you kind of what happened over in marmoset toolbag you know rendering out real time but before I get into all that even there is one more thing I need to mention and the reason I'm bringing it up is because it you know if it isn't done right you will get errors from it and so let me kind of grab on to this first one here I'm going to isolate that and you might have heard already before you might be doing it but it's basically called the exploded method or exploding individual elements away from each other because any time when you're doing a normal bake you have elements that are overlapping or crossing each other at the area or the intersection point where they do come together you actually get baking errors so to avoid this um you know this you basically it's pretty simple you just kind of I'm going to actually isolate this all you have to do is come and grab these individual elements and detach them just like this and then come in and grab both the low and high poly elements together and explode them away that's all that's all you mean by exploding it's just we're taking these parts and separating them so there are no elements crossing each other and that's what's going to you know going to give you the errors as far as the floating geometry goes that's a different story you can just leave that the way it is because these really shouldn't be sunk in or blow blow the mesh like that now in max there actually is another option um you know it's under the render to texture dialog box so I'm going to hit 0 my keyboard let me grab my low poly again I'm gonna hit 0 on the keyboard to bring up the render texture dialog box and other options and then under resolve hit if you see under here hit only matching material ID if you have that turned on and you have assigned material ideas to specific elements of the mesh that way we're telling the the Baker that to basically ignore um anything that's crossing each other so for example we'd have you know this on material ID 1 and this would be on material ID 2 and they're sitting just like that that way the the Baker will know what's what's going on and you can just actually leave everything the way it sits so you won't actually have to explode anything away from each other but I just wanted to bring that up mention it is in max I'm not sure if like Maya or under have this option so I just thought I'd kind of mention that but actually moving on to the cage part of this I'm going to start with the the initial on the one we had errors with I'm going to isolate this and at this point when you get ready to bake you should have had the high poly finish you should have the low poly kind of blocked out and you're either going to be starting your test bake or you're going to be actually you know you would have had the low poly unwrapped and you're going to be doing your actual final bakes on it so the first thing you want to do though to get this set up is to grab the low poly and we're going to hit zero on our keyboard again bring up the render to texture dialog box and the first thing you know you might you might be new to this box you're kind of looking at going wow there's a lot of stuff here but it's really not that bad I'll walk you through the whole thing from start to finish but the first thing you want to do is under the projection mapping tab here you'll notice that the enabled isn't isn't ticked now you can actually do texture baking in 3ds Max and not use a high poly that's completely fine in our case we are using the high so we want to tick that the next thing we need to do is go to pick because it needs to okay what what hi Polly's are we going to be baking here one thing you want to keep in mind too is if you have a number if you had many different things in your scene it'll show up here so be aware that you know like that for example had some boxes and cubes and whatnot going on out here we don't want to add that to our break we just want to add what we're actually trying to bake in my case you know we just have this so I'm going to actually grab everything and the first thing that's going to happen when we do this is your cage is going to be all blown apart exploded apart like this which is completely fine it's normal in remedy that basically you just hit reset and it snaps the cage back to the low poly the cage itself is actually a representation of the low poly so that's that's kind of it's zero point that's it's zeroing out point the next thing I like to do is to turn on shaded because it's a little bit easier to see the the cage and where it's sitting but once you get this all set up the next thing to do is go where it says push moan right here we you know you can come in and actually just put in a number like that tan or whatever but I usually don't go something like that it's what I used to do is just come in and grab the spinner here and we're going to push this up just so it passes out pepper passes the you know this first area here if you notice and this is kind of what I was talking about earlier about setting up your cage when you have floating geometry or anything like that we actually have to push this cage past all the high poly whether it be something like this or you know an environment piece in under no circumstances can you have the height of the cage below the high poly you'll get baking errors and Ray messes every time so in this case we kind of already have the cage passed this part and I don't want to keep pushing this out that's the next thing you know I kind of want to mention too is really you know you never really want to bake in a situation like this you want the cage hugging as close down to your your high and low poly as possible but the problem is if I come and here let me set this to come in here and I go like this okay looks pretty good and I notice you know that we have issues up here is what I want to do and is what I normally do is is push these out separately so the next step is basically to come in and grab the element which grabs the entire element you can see that that probably turned red I hopefully you can see that on this video but the next step to do is I'm going to actually hold down control and while I'm holding down control I'm going to click the vertice part this cage right here when I click that is what that does is allows me to push this section out on its own by itself which I'm going to do right now we'll come back down in here and push this out so that's kind of a quick rundown of how you want to set up the cajon looks like this part might even still be yeah there we go something like that now normally when you're doing your bakes there's a number of settings you can do you're going to do to increase the resolution self up of it but you know when you're doing your initial bake you want to just kind of stay low like at 512 or 1024 because you're you know we'll be doing a couple passes of this to get to kind of fine-tune that cage and everything set up the next thing I want to do or want to talk about before I get too far into over anything here is is what is what you want to do too is normally stick with just using this push in this this tool here the reason for that is because when you use this this is actually pushing the cage in and out along the normals coming off the vertices if you come in like for example let me go to my move if I come in and I start going like this or I come in and scale things out like this that it is it's it's just doing basically its running off the scale tool it's not actually following the normals so I doing that all together I always come in and just grab individual parts here and push these in and out along the way so let's just call this good for now and we'll be moving along okay padding padding is really it's important for doing your normal bake and it's really not all that important for doing much else is what padding does on your normals is it it allows us a baker to kind of take what it take what it needs where your seams are so you know and it helps prevent baking and smoothing errors and stuff like that so usually for like a 2k texture I'll run my padding at 16 and that 16 is basically 16 pixels arm you know and for a 1024 I'll cut that in half but then you know the next part here I want to talk about is sometimes this will be this will get a mess messed up a little bit where it says mapping coordinates sometimes you come in here and it'll kind of be like set like this and this might be on 3 or whatever um that's fine if you're actually intending to bake down to a different UV Channel in most cases you won't be so we're going to be set having this set to use existing Channel both of these and the both of you should generally set to one so just make sure that you know I've seen that come up a couple times where you know is set to a different value but yeah we want to keep that definitely on one I'll put that back on sixteen the next thing here this is where you actually plug in what Maps you're intending to bake so we're going to select add and here's the current maps that you know that we can bake out from here in our case we're going to be doing a normal map so we'll highlight that and you just click add elements um the next part here is basically asking you okay you know where do we want to save this and what what what name do we want to assign to it so all you're going to do is click this three dots box here and it's going to open up the dialog box and this is where you'll see in our case here I'm actually just going to overwrite this because I want to show you a couple things with the actual saving of the texture so I'm going to click this here and ask ask me one over it and this is what I want to show you normally you know I don't know really what you like to work in I normally work in targets or great format to work in usually you're going to be using 24 bits per pixel or thirty-two thirty-two is if you're going to be using an alpha Channel you know we're not really not in this situation but you know it'll be one or the other the second thing to look for is this by default when you first install Macs this will be on compressed turn that off you know normally when you're texturing when you're baking we don't want to compress it just yet I usually work in uncompressed textures I'll bring it into Photoshop uncompressed and then finally when it goes out to the game engine or you know whatever you're working on then you we then we'll go ahead and compress it the premultiplied alpha that has to do with your anti-aliasing on the on the Alpha Channel so I leave that on I just leave it on you know whether I'm going to be using an alpha or not doesn't matter so once we got this kind of set up you know I just click OK and that's it like I was saying you know as far as what side is texture you want to use usually 1024 is will be fine and then your final bake you can set to 2048 you can also plug in a straight numerical value so if you're baking out to like 4k they don't have that here but you can just type it in there um so we'll set that back to 1024 now this part here I had for my previous bake normally this isn't render two files only as you check that the reason for that is because just renters out to the files only doesn't create any kind of you know shell material or anything like that you know if you like using that that's fine I just generally don't use it and then the next part I want to talk about here with the Box the rollout here is under options we're kind of going back to here under normal map space one of the most common settings for doing normal map baking is flipping the y channel or the green channel up or down you know plus or minus and it just depends and Aoife Y negative and that that's why this is on down right now um you know this is where you're going to set the the normal map either Y positive or Y negative I normally work in Y up because the tool bags like that and I just you know kind of stand that but whatever you want to bake out to is fine so you know I'll just keep it it down for now because that's you know this is fine for for what we're doing the next thing you should look for under setup and I yeah I already had the setup before but this is going to be under area by default and this might be turned off so if you you know if you're doing your text test baking that's completely fine just leaving it like this when you finally go to bake your final textures out you're actually going to want to change this anti-aliasing up to cat mahram and then the turn it makes from making sure your global super sampling is on the two common ones is max star or Max 2.5 star or hams early here when I use that I usually set this to a value of one so you know one of these two in most cases I just stick with max are you know this one takes a lot longer to render I usually use this if I'm doing like projection mapping or something like that and then the final thing I wanted to talk about is under let me go back to render here right here apply motion blur we're going to turn that off and then image motion blur we're going to turn that off so this is kind of long-winded and you know this is how the Baker whatever works in max so if you're not I also I do cover external too but you know this these are the general settings that I usually use he you know kind of forget different things whatever you can always kind of come back and look at it again but once you're to this point you're ready to bake I'm not going to actually bake this out right now but you know these are the settings that that you should look for and kind of how things should be looking so the next thing I want to talk about - I'm actually going to take a step backwards - we're going to go back to our cage because I kind of forgot to mention it but well the next thing I want to talk about is with the cage 2 and then you know you also want to avoid skewing the cage out you know I've you know I've kind of seen sometimes a couple different videos and whatnot people coming in and moving the cage around like this this is definitely something you want to avoid altogether the reason for that is is because this here this leg of submission for the cage is a representation of your low poly mesh and if I come in and move this out now I'm telling the Baker that you know though basically the little poly mesh is you know this and it's going to skew your normals it's not going to line up and things aren't going to look look the way they're supposed to you know I you know I guess it's kind of an obvious thing but I thought I'd mention it just just kind of throw it out there but the next part here I'm actually going on to is the baking issues I had and then how I fix some and stuff like that so we'll be moving on to that one next so as long winded as that last section one there's actually a couple things I forgot to mention and I want to talk about it because it is pretty important but the first thing I want to talk about under the projection options box and I want to talk about the ramus check tool and what that does can ever really showed you what's happening when you know you have ramus is going on something to close that out real quick I'm going to come in and just back off the cage so I kind of guarantee myself some rain ances and we render this out and I just kind of want to show you what's going on so everywhere in red is where Ray messes are occurring basically it's returning a null or you know zero value because the cage itself is actually above the high poly mesh another thing to note too is if you notice that even though I have the cage sitting above or below the floating geometry there are no Reynes is showing up here so if you're using a lot of floating geometry at least in the baker and Max you aware that you know um it's not going to show up red for you it's not going to point that out so that's just kind of visually something you'll need to keep an eye on um the next thing I want to mention too is under the Ramos check - once you get the cage finally set up and things are looking good for you you can actually shut this off if you want I've had situation before where you know I've had that everything looked great but there was just like literally like a pixel wide by five pixels long arm that that I had Ramos is going on in a bake down onto the texture and then I had to go you know paint it out during later on in the workflow it wasn't anything that you know was going to show up or look bad but it was there and you know to avoid that altogether you can you can't shut this off on your final pass it's up to you um but the next thing I want to talk about here is under the normal map space tool or options tab and by default tangents checked and why is down but I'd like to talk about object space normal Maps now if you switch this over to local X Y Z this is actually for baking out object space normal Maps and let me actually pull over a couple examples from my other monitor here here we have a tangent space neural map and this here is an object space normal map arm starting out with the tangent space this is mostly the most common normal map will be using for like game engines and you know real time applications and stuff like that the main reason for that is because it's so malleable and easy for 3d artists to work with like right now I can bring this into Photoshop and I can do overlays and all sorts of edits especially you know if you're using endu or something like that it's they're great to work with they're easy to work with with object space normal Maps that isn't quite the case it's not as easy to do overlays and do edits on this type of texture another disadvantage of the object space map is you can't have any UV overlaying each island has to be unique the reason for that is because every part of this map references specifically to a part of your mesh that's it's it's some of the case here but not really but with this you know it's it's it's one to one there is no you can't do any overlaying and you can't do any mirroring of the the mesh to and it's what I mean by that um is let me slide these out of the way here real quick is you you know if I wanted to come in in in mirror this box over let's say this is a part of a big ship or something like that and I was going to use a bunch of these and I just want to quick mirror this to the other side it wouldn't work with an object space normal map um you know they would have to be on the a separate UV sheet or it had be it have to be unique on our current our current sheet on the you know I've been saying on neighthan negative things about the object space central map but there are a couple positives one of them is basically it's actually less taxing and less of a load on your computer to rent render an object space neural map um they out the bakes also come up really really nice so you know they're really they're usually really crisp there's less likely to get you know small anomalies and errors and all that kind of stuff and in the texture I know these these banks here are just they're terrible but they're just text test fake so I can't really you know show you something that's just amazing as far as how well these look when they come out but that's one advantage or a couple advantages of the object space normal map so I've pretty much concludes you know the extra things I wanted to talk about as far as the the normal maps and that the baker and the ramos checks was concerned we are going to be moving on to the next section with the making errors and how I went in fix them so as I mentioned before we were going to come into tool bag and check out this baking issue I had you know in the in the real-time render and I kind of kind of go over and show you what I ran into and how I fixed it but the first thing the one in blue is the one with the baking issue the one in red was the one I fixed so I'm actually going to hide the the fixed one and we'll take a closer look the one in blue basically if you take notice first of all is look at the height how the high poly floating geometry actually ended up on the top of the mesh how they're kind of skewed inward they're all like that you know no matter which one you look at and depending on the camera angle you know it can it can look better or worse there's also an issue here up top where the normals are trying to run across the edge of the the peak here so you know that that's what would happen this is pretty common you know when you're doing something like this so actually I'm going to move on to the fixed version and kind of show you a side-by-side comparison looking at them straight on on the front here you can see the difference between the two these are much much straighter as opposed to these ones here same thing if we kind of look at it you know end in like here and then of course the the peak part here let me rotate that our own you know you can see the difference between the two so well how did I fix this what happened not I fix this um they actually turn on my wireframe on the edges and you can see what's going on here actually on the low-poly how I went in ahead went ahead and fix this stuff with this one here it's kind of the traditional box modeling edges and topology um but with this one I actually added supporting edges and in addition to that I I inserted vertices or I have have a cross section here with vertices right in the middle of where that high poly floating geometry was sitting so you know so what is actually happening or what would hat why did this break basically when a normal map or when you do your baking it has to go around hard edges 90-degree angles and stuff like that it start problem started to come up you know baking baking in normal Maps don't like angles the most ideal situation you'll ever bacon is basically just on a flat plane you know just a plane and in this case we've got a ninety degree angle here and you know 90 giggle here and then you know not not a 90 but you know another steep angle here on top of that everything is set to one smoothing group so is what I'm doing is I'm asking the normal map to kind of take care of all the smoothing and the shading for that and it just it's too much so how do I fix this one way like I showed you is adding supporting edges to the to the high poly or sorry to the low poly mesh another way to do it is actually to break these off into separate smoothing groups so you know another example could have been putting this on smoothing group one putting this on smoothing group two so on and so forth but then we're breaking apart our UV Islands and it's a file workflow you can totally do it it's up to you but the other way to do it too is actually chamfer stuff out we need chamfers to your mesh um it acts you know it reduces the angle right Gregg now we have a 90 and if I were to chamfer this we'd end up with a 45 she'd be going from 45 to 45 down and that that would help the Baker a lot as far as just trying to get rid of these um these issues and then not necessarily angle related but you know inserting vertices in the middle of of the high poly floating geometry basically gives you a normal common straight out of that mesh in that area and that help that can help tremendously for stuff like this going over to the let me turn on the wireframe off over to the tube basically you know like something like this we didn't run into any issues there's really no baking errors here and on either of the sides so that was fine there but we don't once again we don't have a lot of steep hard angles like this here from here to here isn't you know a 90-degree angle not even really close to it and the rest of its just a cylinder or a tube so that's kind of the rundown of you know what to look for once again you know adding supporting edges like this like how I have it here with vertices or separating the smoothing groups is the kind of two main ways to remedy the problem but that pretty much wraps up that that's the section of the tutorial on how you know to solve baking issue problems we're going to be moving on to the the project that was working on it's kind of a you know an actual project not just a bunch of boxes and stuff like that and then we'll be doing the complete workflow with that and I'll be moving on from there okay moving onto the next part of the tutorial I sided to go ahead and start out and see brush to give you an overall idea of what we'll be working on for the next section my goal here is basically to apply everything we've learned from the beginning to an actual project so we're not just working on boxes and kind of doing the same thing but in this case um what what part we'll be focusing on though is this side holster here I'm kind of at the point of where I'm doing the baking and stuff like that on it and I'd like to kind of go over that and use that as our example I started this out actually in max and kind of blocked it out I kind of like using that work full with stuff like this and then bring it into ZBrush and doing extra sculpting and extra details on it I didn't do any hard sculpting like on the backpack here but it's the reason I brought it in here let me go into solo real quick here is just to add extra stitching in that kind of burlap look detail it to it and the reason I like doing this is because it it's all the stuff bakes across seams it really saves a lot of time you know if you're doing the composite texturing and baking and stuff like that when you got all this information baked down going into the Photoshop it just really things kind of really zip along quick and you know your end results usually turn out really good but like I was saying you know this started out in max so I think I'm going to hop over into their next and kind of give you an overview of how I started out and then what we're going to go from here since I already have the high poly finished but let me hop over into Max real quick and we'll go from here so this is the original piece here and I kind of just you know figured out where I wanted it and blocked it out let me actually go into solo mode with that quick and this is a high poly I brought it over into ZBrush as a high in the way I had with the way I had initially set up is you know like a typical hard surface mesh coming out you know working in in 3ds Max or another modelling program like this so it's what I wanted to show you what the next part is basically you know what we do from here you know we have sort of our blocked out low but it's you know it still has all the supporting edges and I got my high poly over in ZBrush but what do we go for where do we go from here how should we you know line all the stuff up and do the bakes and that's what I was going to do next okay so I went ahead and I started removing some of the extra edges and whatnot on the low poly and I kind of got a side-by-side comparison of what we originally had before I get into all that I just want to mention a couple things to the workflow I'm using here isn't exactly the best or worst workflow there is it just happens to be what I'm you know using on this particular piece so I just want you to think that this you know you have to come in here into max or a modeling program and you know block stuff out and do anything like that I could have just as easily started out in C brush and built this out and then brought this into Max and built a low poly around that or I could have just went ahead and you know built a low poly itself and not not of not have ever done a high and just brought that over to so I just kind of want to mention that so I just don't want you to think that you know you have to go in and do this particular work for each and every time because you don't but moving along with that I'm actually going to grab both of these and isolate them both and then we're going to check out what I got going on here so this was the original one the high poly you can see the difference in the the the topology and what I actually ended up removing I went in and got rid of all these supporting edges and whatnot that you needed for that and at the next step I actually don't know how much more I want to remove from here because I don't have really a reference of the high poly itself so you know after cleaning all this stuff up is the next the next thing I'm going to do is actually use go Z and I'm going to bring in the lowest res version of the high poly from ZBrush so I'm going to alt tab over to ZBrush and we're going to grab this guy here and I'm going to use go Z as soon as my computer catches up alright there we go and we'll click on that and then we'll can click continue and this is you know it's got to do its thing and start thinking um let me go back over in the max real quick let it do its thing here it'll it'll it'll pop over here but the reason I need to do this is like I was saying I don't know exactly um how much I want to remove and chances are I that the low poly isn't exactly lining up perfectly as with the high poly but the first thing I like to do is you know when it comes in here it's going to be yellow or pink or something like that I personally don't like that so I go over here and I get rid of that the pink edge or the extra color edges and I just turn it to I have kind of a color I was you like to use it's just a dark black and not only that I like to add my own custom material to it here I've got a kind of a red material and I got the pasty turned down to 30 somewhere between like I don't know 20 to 50 I like to back that off so we're just going to sign that material to select it and the reason I do that is so I can actually see through the high poly mesh on the low and get a really good idea where things are lying up so I'm going to grab both these I'm an alt QM and to isolate them and we're actually going to come in here and start taking a much closer look at what we have to do to line this up I'm you can see right off the bat here you know there's this really this isn't really going to ideally bake so I'm going to have to add extra chamfers and why not up here to get this cleaned up and have a much smoother transition that's one thing when it comes to like spheres and circles or say anything like this you know the Baker can't do anything here it's just going to be really choppy and nasty along here so this has to be smooth it out um edges like this can probably gotten rid of anything on the backside this can all be cleaned up stuff like this another thing you do is hit alt X on your keyboard to go into x-ray mode I'm actually okay that's unshaded but I can get you know get a closer look of how how these things are lined up you can see there's kind of a gap here I don't think I don't think I'm probably going to keep this maybe but you know we'll see how it we'll see how it goes as this project moves along but so I don't eat up a ton of video time is what I'm going to do is I'm going to pause the video and I'm going to clean up some of this and then we'll come back and take a look at where things actually ended up so I actually came back a little sooner than I was plenty on because there was some tools I want to show you I just don't want to go ahead and run past this and have you wondering how I went about actually doing some of this basically in the graphite modeling tools tab on your freeform we have an optional right over here you have three options basically drawing grid drawn surface or drawn selection it's what we want to do is select drawn surface and then right here I already have it selected but normally you it would just say pick and you would select this and then come down and grab on to your high poly mesh that that we'll be working on is what that does is it tells these tools that you know I'm working on the low poly but I'm using the high poly as a reference in one way or another and to kind of give you a quick rundown on how these tools work um some of the most common ones that I kind of use is the first one here is the conform brush and I usually come down I already have the set to ten but you say I set that to 10 if it isn't you know you should set it somewhere a little higher around there like round ten or so but the way this this way this works is if I hold down my control key it actually just the outer amount and that's fall off if I hold down my shift key that draw that adjusts the inter-mountain that's a full strength of the tool is what this tool does is actually once I come come across submission I hold it hold down my left mouse button actually starts snapping to the surface of the high poly mesh so this is a quick way to come in and you know getting getting your low poly in your high poly lined up one thing you have to do those be careful that you know it's not going to work perfectly on every scenario that there's a lot of different tools here and each them kind of do their own thing so this is kind of just like brute force it's like a you know like a baseball bat we're just kind of it come in and you know do anything it doesn't know specifically what you're trying to do I'm going to back out of that a couple times kind of show you the next the next tool but the next one here under the st. it kind of works the same way but it's actually the relaxed conform brush if I select that is what it does is it snaps the surface like the conform brush does but also at the same time an average is your vertices out or it relaxes without similar to any other kind of relaxed tool but to use that you know works the same way you just hover it over the top and it starts to come in and average those things out I use this once a while you know with care or you know being careful because it doesn't it doesn't know a particular kind of edge flow or anything that you're trying to do maybe to it all it does is just averages things out the next one I wanted to show you and I use this all the time too is right at the top drag and the way that works is it works the same way as the other two tools but it allows you to move individual vertices right on top of the the surface of the high poly so you know in a case like this I can almost just come in and start adjusting these vertices for example you know right up that edge were that kind of that belt loop was or something like that that's another great example of how this works now let's say for example I did not I didn't have my low poly at all right I'll actually go ahead and I'm going to remove that out of the scene and just grab my trying to grab on to my high poly here and I'm going to quit going to my left viewport and then I'm going to make a quick plain here and we'll come back and bring it over and I close to this and that should be good and this this is kind of we're going to work the same way first thing I want to do is get rid of these all the extra edges here and I'm going to convert this down to an editable poly and I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to make sure this is selected and I'm going to draw on this surface so the way this works is you can come in and actually let me move this down a little bit you can come in and use this tool and kind of snap this to the surface here for example and this is for building out topology from the ground up the next tool you you would want to use is this guy right here this the extent or the step build I'm going to use extend for this example here but it's what we're we going to be working on as the edges so I'm with this turned on with this toggled on I'm going to hold down shift and I'm just going to drag out one group of polygons at a time and this is a really really good tool I mean it's really fast and it you know it kind of works with you it doesn't work against you or anything like that another way to use this is if you have something like this and you're in your vertex mode you can actually come in and just start pulling out um you know vertices it basically takes sort of a half hour Square and saying you can come in and pull out extra sections like this this I use this all the time but that's kind of a rundown on how you know how to build up top build topology for like fresh stuff either if you had a high or a low poly all there already to begin with or you need to come in and start building something from scratch I use these you know it's like I was saying it's kind of the backbone of what I use to build fresh low poly topology top will high but I'm going to go back and do what I talked about earlier and I'm going to clean that up and then we'll be back to kind of move the project forward okay so I went ahead and I clean up that little poly and in this section here I just kind of want to give you a brief overview of where we started what I ended up with and how everything kind of compared side by side with the high poly from ZBrush but I'm not going to spend a lot of time in this section because I do want to move on to baking an X normal but the first thing I want to show you here is you know once I once I started to break this mesh down there's a couple things you know a couple ways I went about it first of all was obviously getting rid of the edges these extra edges the second thing was is wood this is this mesh this low poly going to support a decent bake and the third thing I'm talking about like the silhouette is you know it doesn't support a decent silhouette does it keep up with the overall look I'm going for for example like I was mentioning earlier I wasn't sure if I was going to keep that strap and really you know I was kind of setting this up with the idea it's going to be viewed and third person may be back here up to here it really doesn't warrant keeping this it's it's not enough silhouette to to keep all that extra topology on there um the bottom half though I decided to keep this here and then this would have actually been just just too much altogether for something like this so I want to completely get rid of all this down here and on the backside of the mesh you know I got rid of all these extra edges there's not really a lot going on back here so we really don't need anything special on the on the strap I ended up keeping one edge in the middle and then I ended up keeping two edges on top and the reason for that is I wanted to let me grab on to this real quick turn serious move on but you can see what I have kind of going on here I wanted to keep the surface of this bubbled up a little bit and kind of rough sort of how this is so if you do happen to view it on its side it's got something going on it's not just straight and hard and boring but it's it's got something going here same with spot I'm here technically you know you can bake this straight down flat on a flat surface but when I do when I kind of build up a surface like that you're looking at it on along the side here it helps you know let's say you're doing like a third person fighting game you know I kind of how Batman or something was and you can swing the camera down it matters now and then um to have this extra kind of stuff now if this were a phone app game or something like that when you're going to be viewing it from way back here of course not if that were the case I'd even take more out of here but I'm also kind of doing this for beauty renders too so comparing it to the the sculpt from ZBrush I just kind of wanted to give you one last rundown on that we kind of see what I did here I went in and cleaned up all this here so it's got a nice it runs along the the high poly as close as possible and you know that's kind of overview of how how I went in about going about this you know um it's not the only way of course if for some reason you want to keep these extra details like this down here or even here you can I just this I felt it's just as a this a pretty balanced set up for what I'm when I'm doing with it the next thing I want to move on to though is the unwrap for the test bake now the test bake isn't as technical and crazy or whatever is it sounds all that means I'm going to spend about 30 seconds unwrapping this thing because we just needed unwrapped good enough to bake but not good enough you know the texture on just kind of show you that I'm just going to come in here and quick throw an unwrap on there um and actually I already went ahead and did this ahead of time but we'll do it again just to show you it's all I would do is I'm going to grab all these these pieces here and this is just for max maybe Maya or blender might be different they might have these tools to I don't use those so I'm not really sure but we're going to go to mapping and flat mapping I usually run this between you know 45 to 65 degrees I'll try 60 with this one we'll get okay and it's all that does is takes and breaks these off into pieces based off the angle I I had set it at next thing I want to do is go back under tools and relax I need these pieces relaxed out and I usually up the the pole amount here will just relax it out a little bit and then I'll go to tools and then pack UVs and then we're going to fill holes you don't it just depends if you whether you need that or not with this I just kind of use it anyways but click OK and that's it and it just kind of this is a disaster if you wanted to texture on this like in Photoshop but it's perfectly fine it's just we'll all we need to do our test bake and that's all that's involved in setting up a test bake then we just convert that back down to an editable poly and we're set so the next step is what I do every anytime I'm really going out to a game engine or starting to do my bakes I don't you know I might forget what I've actually done with this I'm going to scale or whatever but I like to reset the xform I have in my tools over here because I use it somewhat often but you know if you know anything like this it's over in your under your under your tools tabs under reset xform the way it works you just click on it you toggle it toggles on and then with the mesh selected you just let some select reset selected and that's it toggle it back off and then when you come back here it's going to have this orange bounding box around it with the xform modifier on the on the stack you don't need to do anything else to it after this all we're going to do is hit or convert this down an editable poly or collapse it back down the modifier stack and that's it sometimes I like to also reset my pivot point I already have earlier so I didn't need to do it but sometimes you know when you're working on self or whatever your pivot mind some you know end up in different areas just kind of depending on what you were doing but um you know anyways that covers this section of you know what I did to kind of set this up and the reason I didn't want to spend a lot of time on because there's a million one different scenarios and you know you just have to kind of get in there and get your hands dirty and just feel this out yourself as you go but the next part I want to go on to is actually test doing our test Bay using X normal and we'll be viewing this in tool bag too to kind of see our final result so okay what's next section here we'll be talking about X normal and doing baek's in that um you know if you haven't used external yet I recommend kind of at least checking it out it's a great piece of software for doing all kinds of different baking it's got more different types of bakes that can do then pretty much anything out there and the strongest point at least in the workflow I use is it's a it's really good for doing stuff where you're dealing with sculpt some you know this here is pretty dense and this is absolutely nothing compared to how high a mesh coming on a see brush or mud box can actually get and when you start importing stuff like this into a modeling program it gets pretty dog down pretty quick I mean you know you can get up to like at least my machine I've gone up to like two to three million but you know anything more than that and it's easy to do with the sculpt things get pretty nasty in a hurry so I kind of just anytime I'm doing sculpting I just use X normal and it does really good bakes too but getting right into it what I want to first talk about is they actually have their own format I don't use it because I've had issues in the past a lot of baking errors but you know I'm going to let you know it's kind of there to begin with but if we go over here and go to export export selected um it's going to be right here in your drop-down this once you've installed X normal you have an option to you know install a plugin for Macs and I'm just going to rename this test and then save the cool thing about it it has a high definition mesh and a low definition mesh preset which is nice for a quick workflow but like I was saying you know I've run into issues with it so I I kind of quit using it and from there you just kind of export out then bringing yourself over into XML and use that the way I'm going to show you though is kind of how I do it but quick isolate that and the first thing you're going to want to do is actually we're going to with the mesh selector we're going to go into vertex sub-object mode I'm going to grab all the vertices on the whole mesh and then I'm going to hit connect and the reason I'm doing that is because when you export a mesh out of a 3d application sometimes um let me go into polygon mode so you can actually see this better your polygons are actually two triangles together and sometimes these triangles or these the triangulation can get flipped and if any one of these just one is flip X or mobile rejected it won't actually it won't actually accept the bank so you know it basically is what happens is this here you know one of them these one of these get flip so to remedy that first thing we do is we grab all the vertices on the whole mesh and I hit connect and then that way it locks all everything in and there's no there's nothing that could possibly even be flipped the next thing you do is come over adhere to your drop-down list and go to under projection or is that right there um this projection cage is absolutely identical to the one we use in before we only hit zero on our keyboard and we were doing all this kind of stuff um so we'll go over here and I like to use the shaded so we can kind of see what we're doing actually I want to unhide isolate that and from here we're good all we're going to do is like we did before is we're going to push the cage out pass or high poly now normally you know I'm just doing a test bake now so I won't be actually using a cage but normally I would have had exploded these two elements away from each other and done just this I will export actually the cage this time around just to kind of show you how it's done but I don't think I'll be using it for the actual test bake but the next step here once you get the quinces you're satisfied with the call the cage looks we will go down here to export and then it gives us a gift sort of a generic name you can name it whatever you want generally speaking since you have that cage old one that's pretty unique and that should work for you but then at that point you just click OK is what this actually did it didn't export your cage out of max but it created another mesh on right directly on top of where your cage is so I go over to my item list here you can see the object 0:24 cage 0:01 I'm going to click OK on that and that's actually all I can isolate it but that's actually a separate mesh a nurse in our scene and this is what we'll export so to kind of recap um you move that out of the way we had our low poly with the cage and this here would have been exported out and we have our cage itself and the cage the low poly and the cage both get exported out with all the vertices connected like this me back on here a couple times so at this point you're pretty much ready to bake once you've had those two exported out I already before I started doing this video I exported the high poly out of 3ds or out of ZBrush ahead of time so the next part will actually be looking at the external UI and then going through a test bake with it and then checking it out in toolbag okay before we move on to the next section there's actually something really important I need to talk about and that's doing your immune occlusion bake so far but I've been kind of pushing the idea of exploding your elements away from each other kind of like I have in this version here which you should do for your normal bake but when you're doing your Ameen occlusion bake you're going to want a separate version the same workflow as you did with with the exploded version here for the normal map but you're going to want to have a separate version like this for doing your ambient occlusion bake and the reason for that is because if I were to bake this down do a nail bank on this I would get some definition down in here and some shading and definition you know across the details here but that dark shading that would come you know in here below this strap or and back here nothing would show up and that's you know pretty important that that you that you keep these two together so to kind of recap on an actual workflow you're going to have one version here like this for the big you're going to have one version like this for the ambient occlusion bake and as an option you could also bake the AO the ohm the AO map like a secondary AO map like this and then composite both AO maps down in Photoshop hopefully that kind of makes sense another option you can also do to what I kind of need to mention is you don't actually need a high poly mesh to do an ambient occlusion bake like right now we can actually just take our low poly by itself and do an AO bake just you know as it sits without any high poly at all so that's kind of one one thing I needed to bring up before we move on up move down to the next section okay so once you've got X normal installed and opened up this is kind of the the initial UI you see when when you open it up one nice thing about X normal is all the different options all the different baking options it has right under this tab here one of the kind of cool things it can do under the render you can use the default bucket render which is what I usually use but you can also use your GPU cores to do some pretty quick rendering you know like you sometimes I when I've used this when I've tried this I've been doing al maps you have to come in here and actually up the settings but it you know honking quicken it it can bake a nail AO map all pretty quick but I'm kind of getting ahead a little bit on there so before we get into any of this I actually want to come back and show you the workflow of getting stuff into X normal so going back to the high definition meshes section I'm going to right click on this tab here and we're just going to go to add meshes we're going to come down I'm going to add the mesh exported out of ZBrush which is the case hi Paul obj and the settings up here up top once we add a mesh you kind of notice a couple things come up I generally don't mess with these other than the mess scale one issue you can come up with come up with in baking is sometimes when you have a mesh that's kind of scaled down you got a lot of detail in it you can run into baking errors so this is kind of the only that's the only setting I ever change but if you are going to use this general set like if I set this to 2 for example I'd also set my low definition mesh in its scale to 2 as well but moving on to the low definition mesh up it's brought in the same way right we right click on this add meshes come down and this in this case I'm going to add my the K slope all now on the low poly section I'm actually going to there's a couple things I need to go over the first one is the minimum frontal and maximum rear edge distance these numbers here are just sort of generic straight up numbers of a minimum maximum ray distance that X normally uses max has the same thing but since I kind of always use a cage in there I I didn't really go over baking without a cage in there but there's actually a tool that X normal has for setting these min and Max up if you're not going to use a cage and that's right under here in the tools tab and then under Ray distance calculator when I click on this are you know pretty simple dialog box comes up and it's all you do is click go and once you do that X normal goes and checks out your high and low poly mesh and Comp tries it's best to come up with a minimum and maximum ray distance based off of which you have instead of just a you know generic 0.5 and 0.5 now the numbers it comes well up with our sometimes better than the 0.5 and 0.5 but nevertheless a cage see generally speaking is still the most accurate way because let's say you know this is sort of an average average figure and baking with a cage is continuously much more accurate as you go across the surface of your mesh you may have small areas that expand out into larger areas and steep angles and shallow ones you know as good as this does on a cage is still generally better not every time but usually I'm not going to use these numbers this time around in our test bake so I'm just going to close that but once you're satisfied with these values you'll hit stop and then you can just click copy results once you click that it copies these results over to right here so instead of 0.5 you'll have the values that came up with the next thing I want to talk about is this use cage thing now if I right click on this box again and go to browse external cage file this is where I bring in the cage that we've made in in Macs so the case load Paul cage obj now you'll see this come up and this is why we connected all the verts together basically this is telling you that unless the topology on your meshes aren't on your low pal mesh and your cage aren't absolutely identical X normal won't work right and I'll spit it out so we're going to click OK on that I'm actually not going to be using cage and our first test bake but I'm just kind of giving you a rundown the next thing I want to talk about is smooth normals now normally I use use exported normal so that what I would have already known what I needed and I just use this so in our case we have everything set to 1:1 smoothing group average normals is let's say you had multiple smoothing groups but you wanted to basically setup as if you had everything set to 1 this is what average normals does and the final one is hard normals this gives you sort of a faceted like if you were to it's basically you know that faceted look on your low poly when you have a separate normal value for each polygon I generally never really use that or I haven't any kind of recent projects but that's kind of what these 3-3 do but usually I'm going to use use exported normals um let's see that that pretty much covers everything I use in the in the low poly section so I can actually move on one thing I'm gonna do is uncheck the cage because we're not going to use this time around with that going down the baking options since we're just doing the normal map like the most common Maps generally you're going to use as a normal map an AO map um so you starting off with the normal map these boxes here are where you actually can adjust different values they have for each map and up in here you can adjust your texture size we're going to go up to 2k just you know just because it's a quick render even you know because it's a normal map they don't take very long the edge padding once again you know we've seen this before it's pretty straightforward and then the bucket size I generally stay with 256 generally like in max anyway the larger bucket you have the better quality results you generally get I don't know if that same Theory transfers over to X normal but you know generally speaking I SiC I say with 256 and then anti-aliasing you know if you're your initial pass especially if you're doing an AO map like we're just doing test renders stick with one because it's kind of a waste and it takes a lot of extra time for you know for test making whatnot on your normal map kind of the same thing but the first thing we're going to do is go to our normal map click this and the thing is you let me actually let me set that to default all right the first thing you'll notice here is you can change the texture coordinates now you can do you can change these values out and change the actual the x y&z on these generally speaking you don't have to most things not everything but most things just usually get changed in the Y value either Y plus or Y negative in this case we're going to bake it out to Y plus we're going to be viewing it in tool bag but that's the settings there on the background color by default you know it should be 128 120 255 and your RGB that's kind of like the the the standard that it should be set to and you know there's really no reason to change this so I don't but I'm just going to let you know it's there and then when tangent is checked of course for baking on a tangent if it's not we're doing an object space normal map so you know it's just either an on or off thing but since we are doing a tinge space map I'll leave that on so now that we have everything set up here the next thing I'm going to do is we're go ahead and do the bakes so in a quick positive actually I'll actually will go ahead and bake it out because I'll kind of want to show you what it's going to do why we're baking so we're just gonna click generate maps and it's going to UM one thing you know one thing I might also mention too right up here under notify tile updates if you don't have that turned on um it'll just kind of stay solid but if you want to actually watch this thing being rendered out you know you know yeah that can be changed right here but here is sort of just kind of a rough rundown of the normal map and is what I'll do next is I'll actually up will upload this up into toolbag and check it out okay before I move on to the next section there's actually something pretty important I left out from the previous and that's your file output whereas it right where you're actually saving it to under the baking options tab under output file it's right at the top here and basically here's the path and you can just type in the name here or if not you can click the green box type in the name here and then click Save you know it's pretty obvious it's kind of just like everything else but I figured I'd mention it so you're not kind of digging around looking where you know where you actually output this file to the next thing is an X normal um it actually adds for you and underscore and the type of map you baked out on your under name so for example my name KS to the next term will came in and put an underscore normals and it does that for every type of math you bake out so there's a couple things I just kind of want to mention before we move on but actually going to our our test bake here in toolbag I am pretty satisfied with the overall results and looked about how I how I was looking for it to look the only problem we ran into is right here if you look right here and you know hopefully you can see that in the video I've got this sort of projection going on from the from the top half and the reason that happened was because I'm not using a cage and I didn't explode my my elements away from each other so if you ever run into a situation like this look for something like that you know because this will happen but for the test bake purposes we're fine and you know and the next thing I wanted to actually kind of talk about too is um setting up a scene that's good enough to test your normals in now a tool bag by default it uses an image base or material based lighting so anytime I bring a mesh in you're already ready to go now if you want to check your normals and like Max or another modeling program by default they don't use a specific kind of lighting because this is expensive to render they just use a basic like modeling ambient lighting and that's not going to work for testing normals so what you want to do and what I normally do is let me actually turn off the skylight M I bring in an omni light into the scene I like using those and it's what you want to do basically is once you get your light in the scene kind of sweep it across the surface and we're looking for not only errors but you know we're looking for is this actually holding up and looking like the way we wanted to is it going to is it going to give off the look that we kind of needed to in-game or whatever application you're at you have any working in and that's kind of the main idea of you know how to check for normals or baking errors and whatnot in a modeling program or something like that but the next thing I want to talk about is normals themselves and normal Maps um since we have the set up I'd like to kind of draw your attention down to the bottom half here now the best you're ever going to view a normal map is straight on like all we have here but take notice what happens when I rotate this the camera angle down you know we kind of lose all that depth that effect and everything we had when it was right here the reason for that is because we have no geometry supporting the normals when it's being rendered out generally speaking both the normals and the mesh kind of work together to give you the overall look but when you just have a flat plane let me actually turn my wires on real quick you know the only thing we have here is the normal map holding up the whole bottom half that's saying other than you know a couple edges down here let's compare that though to to the top half um where I where I kind of go going back to what I was mentioning here where I added this extra geometry and let me turn my wires off again and kind of take a look at it straight down and you know it looks pretty solid things are basically how the high poly looked but as I sweep the the camera down it still holds up um and that's because we actually have some polygons here facing facing the camera as I as I come down to the side as opposed to this where it's just a flat plane so to kind of recap on everything you know it's a constant balancing act of your your try contour your poly count and how much detail you need to keep in your mesh as you're as you're working along that kind of concludes the section of doing our test bake and the next section will actually be our last and is what I wanted to go through in there is some common errors and how to fix them it will be just sort of a kind of a quick rundown in a recap of you know things we've gone over okay for the next and final section of this tutorial we're going to be working back in max kind of back on the character again and so what I want to go over is common workflow problems and modeling issues that you can run into along the way that will give you rendering errors and baking errors but the piece we'll be working on is the side Hollister again so let me go ahead and isolate that and then turn my edges on again but the first thing I want to talk about is n-gons now n-gons are polygons that have more than four sides like I was talking about before it's okay to use triangles and an ideally we want quads but if you have a situation you have n Gon's you're going to run into all kinds of rendering and baking problems and to reproduce this i'm actually going to go up to my edge sub-object mode I'm actually going to insert a vertex right on this edge here and then we'll I'm going to actually move this up towards the middle and without further explanation you can already see we got some kind of smoothing problems going on here if I turn my edges off you know you can really see it show up but something like this I was saying you want to completely avoid this altogether you don't want have to have any in guns anywhere on your mesh when you're you know even if you're not going to be doing any bakes these will cause problems with your rendering just on your low poly but to expand on that even more this isn't really the common problem the common problem is having two vertices piled up on top of each other like that like if you use the cemetery tool or just different things like that via this situation even if it's just kind of slightly off-center this can happen so you know to remedy this problem is what you can do is come in to your vertex sub-object mode either select everything or just hit ctrl a and grab it all and then go to your weld tool and if I go under settings um normally you don't want to set to like for example 0.5 it's going to start welding everything up we don't want that is what you're looking is what I usually run this at is like point zero zero five or point zero zero one and you can see here we have before it was at five sixty five and after welding it's at five sixty four so that's kind of a tool to use you know your weld tool to get rid of that problem all together but let's say we weren't at that part how do I actually identify the problem to begin with so I'm accident weld this up because I want to keep this end gun going here I'm going back out of this and I'm going to go to my polygon sub-object mode and over in your graphite modeling tools under selection at the very bottom you have a selection tool here you'll see a equal to less than or greater than it's what we want to do is set the sides to four and have this on greater than so it's looking for anything that has four greater than four sides and then we'll click the Select so what you can see what happened here is it selected the polygons that have you know greater than four sides so you'd know right off the bat and this is a simple match if you were working on like a very large project with a lot of stuff these tools become a lot more valuable you know and that's just a quick way to identify problems like that so at this point you go okay we have an issue here let's go over to our vertex sub-object mode select it all and we're going to weld it up boom problem solved so the next thing I want to talk about though is the STL check tool it's kind of an old-school tool but it's still you know worth mentioning um let me actually grab onto this polygon here I'm going to delete it now of course we know I deleted this out but let's say we're working like I was saying a much larger project now if I throw the STL check on there it's in your modifier stack here your list it's right here under the essence for STL check and it's what it does is it allows you to check the mesh for errors open inches double faces spike multiple edges or everything and it's all you have to do is come in here and click check now when I click that I can actually reveal this out by faces or edges or don't select - that was kind of a nice feature there - but of course you know I got this open edges here and if we didn't really intend this like if this was kind of buried way down and here something like that and I might not have seen it this will show up clear as day there's an issue with the mesh so that's just kind of another quick way to check the mesh for errors I'm going to control Z out of this a couple times again and show you another tool here too but the next tool I want to talk about is um sometimes when you run into a situation where you've got a normal issue going on and things aren't running out right you don't really know what's going on there's actually a tool over it now I have a kind of a special menu up here but it's under the same category if you'll go under modifiers and then geometry it's right here called normal modifier is what this does let me double check to make sure this material yeah I'm going to set this to one side again but it's what this does you can actually unify the normals and then flip them all together at once that way we know we know that the the normals have been are sort of equalized out and I've had I've actually been able to correct different rendering in in normal problems with this here sometimes when you're creating geometry with splines when you actually go to create it over to an editable poly you get weird kind of normal issues going on and I've been able to correct that problem using this here but once we unify them and flip them out you can either collapse it down or you know I wish you just convert it to an editable poly again and then I'm going to come back in onto my polygon sub-object mode ctrl a and then flip them back and that pretty much will it won't fix the problem every time but it definitely can help fix the problem sometime it's worth actually at least trying once in a while you can run into a problem where normally flipped like not the whole thing it might have been a user error it might have been a max error along the way but let me actually go ahead and turn this double-sided back on again kind of show you what's going on but now if I come down into my polygon sub-object ball and select that flip it you know there is kind of a smoothing error here but it might not be all that noticeable if you're working on a really big project but when you go to bake it out it's like oh hey Jack what's you know what's going on here oh yeah all you really need to do sometimes to identify certain problems it's just coming here and do do a quick render you know like you can see how much more noticeable this problem is as opposed to in the viewport here I mean yeah you can see it but like I was saying on a larger project you might not notice that just come in and do a render and you know the problem comes out clear as day oh the next time I want to talk about I actually did mention it earlier in the tutorial but over in your utilities tab down here on reset xform that you know I'm just kind of mentioning again just kind of the freshman minor because this one's really important especially with stuff working in Macs basically anytime you scale a mesh up okay we saw it scale up in our viewport but they did the data and the information behind the scenes making all this happen didn't scale so anytime you scale a mesh also eventually at some point want to reset the X farm especially for going out to a game engine you're going to be doing baking and stuff like that I always do that so I know I just thought I'd kind of mention that one again just as a refresher but something that you know it's kind of one of those things that might not be so obvious but you know maybe it is but if you're having rendering issues on your mesh or baking problems in max and you you just don't know what else do one thing that I've had happened in the past that corrected a problem it's just actually exporting this out as an obj and then re-import it back into the scene so you just grab onto the mesh we go to export selected um you know I just pick select a name and then save now normally when export obj is I want to do normals smoothing groups I don't really use this optimized stuff and then as far as materials it depends on whether you want that or not a lot of times I won't use it especially for like just repairing something and then we export that out and then we'll re-import it back on the seam once again it's one of those things that it won't solve the problem every time but I have had success on fixing different errors and stuff like that on a mesh especially going back to the the spline issue to you know when you have flip normals after converting a spline over to an editable poly that helped tremendously a couple times so the final tool I wanted to kind of mention to you was you know I this tool isn't really used all that often but it's up under modifiers and under geometry and then it's called edit normals modifier and it basically is what it you know kind of says it is and in the sense that first of all you can see actually the direction of the normals and how what direction they're going so it's almost kind of a nice diagnostic tool in a way but if you needed to for whatever reason you can actually come in and start tweaking and editing the normals manually once again you know this isn't something that you're going to use that often but I just kind of want to let you know it's there um you know then it's got stuff like unify and break you know it's got some tools that you that you can possibly try to diagnose and repair meshes normals with so you know all in all that's um that's kind of the tools I wanted to go over and wanted to show you but essentially that's that's kind of wraps up the end of this tutorial I hope that you kind of found some useful information out of it and you know if you're having problems doing baking and whatnot just kind of keep at it it's kind of a learning process just try different things and eventually get the hang of it and you'll just be able to slam these texts result you know with no problem but my name is Justin Dewey and I hope you enjoyed my tutorial and we'll see you then

Channel: JDGameArt

Views: 25,225

Keywords: Tutorial (Industry), tutorial, Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), zBrush, Texture Artist (Profession), texturing, Texture Mapping, 3D Modeling (Profession)

Id: yoGPs7lKXak

Length: 96min 0sec (5760 seconds)

Published: Thu May 29 2014