Next-Gen Weapon Creation – Day 3: Unwrapping and Texture Baking
Creating weaponry effectively in a next-gen workflow requires detailed knowledge of a variety of very specific skills and tools. In the third tutorial of this knife creation series, we will examine UV mapping and baking, two highly complementary sciences.
This tutorial is Day 3 in a series – Go to Day 1 Day 2 Day 4
By effectively taking advantage of smoothing groups and island breaks on the UV map, as well as a baking method known as the exploded bake, we circumvent many of the pitfalls that plague those new to the baking process. The final result will be normal and occlusion maps that are generated as quickly and painlessly as possible, and a that is mesh completely ready for texturing.
Please note that, although we will be using 3ds Max, the theories and techniques discussed here can be applied to any 3d application that supports unwrapping and texture baking.
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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
Start at the beginning – Go to Day 1
This tutorial is Day 3 in a series – Go to Day 1 Day 2 Day 4
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Waited for this one. Thanx for the video!
Fantastic work! hope to see more from you soon :D
Great job! I learned some things. Thanks.
I learned a few UVW unwrap tip as well.
tip:
When you were doing those inside polygons for the holes and were moving them and aligning them on top of each other –once they were flat ….just use copy and paste to perfectly stick them on top of each other.
Hmm, one thing that bugged me is why would you break up all those different smoothing groups as islands in UV editor? Normals should be baking nicely even with them attached AFAIK. Or there is something I am missing.
Great tutorial overall. Very clear, straight forward presentation.
why its not for downloading ?:(
To download these videos(as I did), you can download the with Real Media Player. There’s a download feature for any kind of video in any kind of format from any site.
Your Welcome!
the baking process is rather tedious.. i would have to use other application such us mudbox for baking maps.. but other than that, i learn lots of modeling techniques here..
any other tutorial that show easier for baking normal map??
Been Modeling for 2 months and half way through the 3rd tutorial… Learning a lot, keep up the good work.
TY and all the best.
Super tutorial. Not for beginers:)
Great tutorial but not as easy to follow as the first 2 for a beginner.
Hey guys this is a fantastic tutorial although i am having two slight problems, if anyone thinks they might be able to help me please see the video i have showing the problems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrOAhyhaUtQ , its not showing them very well but its something :)
Awesome tutorials!Realy realy helpful!
Thx for this tutorial, however I would like to see a tut in modeling low to high poly, properly setting up smoothing groups along with UV unwrapping.
I can model high to low poly, unwrap and bake a pretty flawless normal map, I just can’t grasp smoothing groups and breaking up the groups in the uv unwrap.
Im getting tripled vertices’ in the UDK along with lighting problems (being able to see the hidden tris).
excellent tutorial thanks,
when i do the expoded bake and detach polys from my mesh, i get left with holes / missing polygons where they have been detached,
what am i doing wrong?
once again thanks for this tutorial
andy
For unwrapping the grip (the inner polys, not the mirrored sides) – it would have been easier to create the seam first (select the edge then convert edge selection to seam). Then if you would have used edge ring and converted the edge selection to faces, projected the mapping or used pelt map > relaxed, you would be done (instead of going in and selecting all the parts, projecting each chunk, then piecing together the UV islands). I hope that made sense. {:)
Thanks for the tuts. I was stunned at the floating geometry stuff you taught for the high poly as I hadn’t heard of this before.
Dude, this tut is awesome, I had previous knowledge with unwrapping but this really tied up the loose ends
Thanks =D
Can you make these tutorial videos downloadable please?
Hello, can someone tell me how does he UV map the blade beacuse i cant figure it out i select one side of blade then i uncheck the normalize map and press quick planar map but i still have to UV map the other side of blade even if its the same??
Fixed the problem just added symmetry.
These tutorials are a lifesaver. Thank you (and your brother) so much! I have to agree though, wish I could download these videos, it would be a lot easier :-(
Hello.
Why you can’t have one UV island with 2 smooting groupt. I’m very often doing one island with more then one smooting group. I never saw and “bugs”. Can you explain it a little bit more?
Wow! man, you rock! I have a question: If I model a high-poly in only at few parts of my model I can still bake the textures normally?
Thanks and GREAT MAN!
Great tutorial. I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago. I never fully understood unwrapping and baking. So I was wondering how the process works. When taking the high poly object and placing it over the low poly object, should the high poly object fully cover the low poly object to bake in its shape? Not sure I fully understand what’s happening during a bake.
Thanks for taking the time to put out a great tut!