In this three part video tutorial series, lead video game artist, Ron Davey, will walk you through the process of creating a game-ready environment prop in Autodesk Maya, and also share his personal techniques and thoughts along the way.
This tutorial is Day 2 in a series – Go to Day 1, or Day 3
In the first part of the series, Ron created the low poly model from reference and then moved on to create the high poly source for the purpose of texture baking. Now, in the second part, Ron will proceed to unwrap the model, lay out the uvs, and then bake out high poly normal and occlusion maps using Mayas transfer maps tool.
Final Effect Preview
Video 1
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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
Video 2
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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.
This tutorial is Day 2 in a series – Go to Day 3 or
Start at the beginning – Go to Day 1
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This is awesome! Love this series. I live in NYC and modeling parts of the city is always inspiring. I don’t work in games, I work in VFX. But a lot of the techniques shown here will really help me improve my workflow when building both low and high poly objects for compositing. Thanks, and can’t wait to see the rest… and whatever else you do a tutorial on.
My only critique is to say that the audio is not the best quality. Maybe check your microphone for recording more tutorials.
thanks for the nice words.
one note: i forgot to mention in the tutorial when baking the normals to add a smooth to the high poly object when baking. it’s located under Mesh/Smooth. this will ensure a nice bake result. the short cut ’3′ i mention thru out the tutorial is just for previewing and not the final bake.
yes its just a basic microphone and since this is my first tutorial im still smoothing out the wrinkles :)
cheers
Hi There!
Really great tutorial and work flow! Thank you for taking the time to do this for us! I have enjoyed following along!
Is the final texturing video to this scene anywhere? I can’t seem to find it? Is it still being made?
Thanks! :)
Highly anticipating Part 3. Any idea when it will be uploaded?
Great tut series! Can’t wait for part 3.
Texturing is my major weakness, and I have real trouble layout out the UVs. I have a few questions:
How do you manage to texture a prop which has a large difference in geometry? For example, say you have a large building, you’re gonna have large faces for the walls, but then you’re gonna have much smaller faces for things like the door. How do you manage to fit the different UVs with such size differences into the UV area without making some textures look insanely stretched?
Also how do you decide what to actually include in the UV area? Because I see that even though your subway model has many many pieces, you still did it ALL in one single texture file without splitting it into different textures for different props, and yet you still managed to get it all evened nicely with minimal stretching like I said in my first question.
And finally, do you have any tips generally on keeping tabs what UV is linked to what? Like I said above, you painted it all in one single file, and yet you seemed to have no trouble remembering what was what.
I hope that makes sense. I’m in a bit of a rush so it might be written a bit poorly, sorry!
If I may answer part of this, I would suggest thinking in terms of what detail is most likely going to be seen in your final application. If this is for a game, a character would probably be closer to the door than to the full detail of the building. So when you think in terms like that, you would want higher quality textures near something that is seen in closer proximity. Or if you are doing a composite for a film, whatever the camera is closer to would be modeled and textured in more detail. So you could have a separate material for things that are further away, and UV those to a single texture that is of lower resolution. I hope that helps.
-Robert
Hey, i seem to be getting some strange error with the baking of the normal maps. I am getting some defined dark seams.
I kept the normals hard on the low poly obj. and smoothed the high poly object. I have tried to adjust ‘fill seams’ but it still doesnt do anything. How do i get the edges to look smooth (no seams) without softening the normals on the low poly obj. ?
Please help asap im tearing my hair out :(
I have also used xNormal and getting same results
(uv’s are laid out pretty much the same as Ron’s in this tutorial)
Adam