Tutorial Details
- Program: Blender
- Difficulty: Advanced
- Completion Time: 2-3 hours
Final Product What You'll Be Creating
Normal maps are widely used in games to make low poly models look high poly. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a high res Skull model, generate a normal map from that model and learn how to apply this to its low poly version.
Techniques covered in this tutorial include multires sculpting, baking a normal map, baking ambient occlusion and applying the maps to a low poly model.
This tutorial uses the free and open source Blender suite. If you’re new to 3D, following this tutorial in Blender is an excellent way for beginners to get started. (Don’t worry – this tutorial has plenty of techniques for more advanced users too!)
Step 1
We first start with loading a background reference image. I have made sketch of a skull in front and side profile. You can also download this reference for a good 3D study of a skull model.
Go to View > Background image and load the image.
Step 2
Select the default cube by right-clicking. Hit F9 to go the editing options. Here, in the multires panel click on the button ‘Add Multires’. Click the ‘Add level’ button 3 times. We see that the cube’s shape has been changed to a sphere.
Step 3
Place the cube matching the reference image.
Step 4
We now begin sculpting. Select ‘Sculpt Mode’ from the Mode menu. Blender has good high res sculpting tools and features. Select the Sculpt panel in the Button window. You can also access the sculpt tool by pressing ‘N’ anywhere in the 3D view. The shortcut for the most commonly used tools in Blender are ‘D’ for draw, ‘G’ for Grab, ‘S’ for smooth, and ‘F’ for size. You can also adjust the tool brush settings according to your needs.
Step 5
Use the ‘Grab’ tool to pull out the basic shape of our object, matching the subject. Press ‘G’ and then click drag on the object.
Step 6
Don’t forget the front view. Match the shape with the reference.
Step 7
After the desired shape has been achieved, add 2 more multires levels. We’ll mostly be using the ‘Draw tool’ (‘D’ shortcut) in this section. Press Shift to subtract form. This is easier with a pressure sensitive graphics tablet, but can be completed with only a mouse. First, dig out the eye socket.
Step 8
Sculpt in and out to form the other basic parts of the skull.
Step 9
Add levels in the multires panel to sculpt in more details.
Step 10
Again, don’t forget the front view.
Step 11
Switch between the GRAB and DRAW tools as necessary.
Step 12
We now see the bottom and clear the jaw line. Check the overall form before we begin with the teeth.
Step 13
Draw the teeth and other remaining details.
Step 14
We will now make a low poly version from the high res model. Go to object mode. Right-click on the skull and press Shift+D to duplicate it. Select either one.
Step 15
In the multires panel, reduce the level to 4 and press the ‘Apply Multires’ button. We now have a low poly base.
Step 16
We will now UV Unwrap the model. Select the low base model and press TAB to enter the Mesh edit mode.
Select the middle loop of vertices. On the front side deselect the vertices as shown in the image.
Step 17
Press Ctrl+E and click on ‘Mark Seam’.
Step 18
Split the 3D view screen into 2 parts – one for 3D view and other for UV editing.
Step 19
While in the mesh edit mode, Press ‘A’ to select all vertices. Press ‘U’ and select ‘Unwrap’.
Step 20
You will get UV layout that you can edit in the UV Editor. Rotate/Scale accordingly.
Step 21
Create a new texture image. Click on Image >New.
Step 22
Type in the dimensions of the image you want, and press OK.
Step 23
Next we’ll create our Normal Map. Right-click to select the high res model first and then Shift + Right-click the base model. Press ALT-G to clear location. What actually happens here is that both our models are in the same location in the 3D space, overlapping each other.
Step 24
In the Button window, press F10 to bring out the Render options. Click on the ‘Bake’ panel. Select ‘Normals’ and ‘Tangent’ from the menu. Click ‘Selected to Active’. Click ‘BAKE’.
Voila! We have our normal map!
Step 25
All the high-res sculpture details are baked (according the the UV layout) on the image we created for the Low poly Base model.
Step 26
Save the Image. Don’t forget to save the .blend file on each milestone, also.
Step 27
Before we bake the AO map we will use the following Ambient Occlusion settings.
Hit F8 to go to the World Settings. Select ‘Ambient Occlusion’. Select ‘Approximate’ method. Turn on ‘Pixel Cache’ and enter value ’1′ for ‘Correction’.
Step 28
Again, Select the high res model first, then the low res model. Press ALT+G to clear location. (Ignore this step if you have not moved the models). Now press F10. In the Bake panel, select Ambient Occlusion this time. Hit BAKE.
Step 29
Your AO map is now ready. Save the image with a new name.
Step 30
No we will apply our maps to the base model. First, move the High Res model to another layer, as we don’t need it any more. Select the high poly model and press ‘M’. Click on the layer block to move.
Step 31
Select the layer in which we have our base model. Select the Model and F5 to open the Materials panel in the Buttons window. Next we’ll apply the AO map. In the ‘Texture’ panel, select Tex1. Press UV in the ‘Map input’ panel. In the ‘Map to’ panel press ‘Col’.
Step 32
Press F6 to open the Texture Panel in the Buttons window. Select texture type > Image.
Step 33
Load the AO map in the image panel.
Step 34
Now we will apply our Normal Map. Add New Texture in the Texture panel (press F5 to bring material buttons).
Step 35
Press ‘UV’ in the Map input panel. For normal maps we press ‘Nor’ in the ‘Map to’ panel. Move the slider value of ‘Nor’ way up.
Step 36
Press F6 to open the Texture panel and select ‘Image’ as the texture type. Press ‘Normal Map’ in the Map image panel. Load your normal map in the Image panel.
Step 37
Now we will preview our models with maps applied in the 3D view. But first we will add a few lamps. Press SPACE anywhere in the 3D view to bring up the menu. Select ‘Add LAMP’. Add 3-4 lamps and place them around the model.
Step 38
Now to preview the model, go to the ‘Game’ menu. Turn on Blender GLSL Materials.
Step 39
Change ‘Draw Type’ to ‘Textured’.
Step 40
And we now have our model with maps applied!
Play with the AO map in your favorite image editing software and see the results. Press the ‘Reload’ button in the image panel of the Texture section (F6) to refresh the Map. The model is now ready to export.
Final Product
Don’t miss more CG tutorials and guides, published daily – subscribe to Cgtuts+ by RSS.
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to our RSS Feed, Follow us on Twitter or simply recommend us to friends and colleagues!
By Karan Shah
Join our newsletter!
Create a Tutorial, Get Paid!
Have something to teach the world? Want to earn money doing it? Tutorials, screencasts, and articles published here on Cgtuts+ are largely contributed by readers just like you! We'll pay you great money for good content. Find Out More
Excellent!!! I’ll be coming every day!!
I think people need to stop bad-mouthing Blender. It can do anything max can do, and the interface takes time to get used to, but once you do, you’ll like it more then anything else!
thanks a lot for this tut, great starter for me.
by the way am a Ugandan 3D artist, used blender a lot for architectural visualisations but never tried organic objects before. am looking forward to pursuing this with blender no doubt
nice tutorial and well explained
Learning Blender’s GUI is about like using GIMP’s – quite a bit NON-intuitive, but memorizable. [I don't know why "open" projects seem to be like that] It seems to be able to accomplish ALMOST all of the things the “big guys” do.
The tut, for me, was a bit difficult to follow – as are most “rote” step oriented instructions. It might help to segment the steps into major goals with an explanatory paragraph about what will be accomplished and WHY you are doing it that way. That’s a method used in professional instruction manual development which works. Just a thought.
Perhaps these kinds of tut’s are best accompanied by a screencast.
Sooo awesome :D this it what I been waiting for :D Great tut, and great site ;b
Yes, Blender can be difficult to navigate, and yes, there are probably commercial programs that have more and easier features. However, as many people have been saying, we don’t all have money trees in our backyards. We’re not trying to be cheap; we simply can’t afford those other modelers. C4D costs almost $1,000? Sorry, but there are better ways to spend that money. Blender is the perfect program for artists who have loads of talent but not loads of cash. As far as the bad GUI goes, it may not be an issue much longer. Version 2.5 is expected to be greatly improved.
The key thing to remember about Blender is that if you have any kind of problem with it, any kind of criticism… then get off your backside and join the development!
Make the tool what you want it to be! You can’t do that with a proprietary software.
What about topology??
I can see that there is no topographical information on this scull at all. Shouldn’t we be teaching people how to model the correct way, even if it is going to be used for a low poly model.
For those of you badmouthing Blender because of the GUI:
The magic of Open Source software is that you can CHANGE it as much as you want. Something missing? want a function? Write it in! If you don’t like the GUI, modify it.
I have yet to see a version of 3DS max where you could have open a UV mapper (which, by the way, has the best smart projection coding of any piece of 3d software(proven), 3 different views of your object, a material editor which also included the render settings, a logic engine and modifiers, a serious amount of exporters (MOST of which work), that can import over 20 file types (with some 100KB python scripts added), a built-in sculpt tool, the ability to use nodes, recalculate normals by pressing one button (I’ve used 3ds max too, and this required selecting every inverted face and flipping it, which also takes less time in blender), the Ability to preview something in the 3d window before rendering…and more, probably, that I don’t know about.
Oh, and if you find the UI difficult I feel bad for you. There’s quite a bit of online documentation, and almost everything can be accessed through the keyboard rather then clicking into a different tool every few seconds.
Kinda of stupid commenting as something as old as this, but I just have to add my thoughts to this:
I study computer science at GU university in Sweden, and have done alot of different computer stuff, ranging from a lot of different topics of which I will not name, since I am not smug, I just want to make it clear that I believe myself to be fairly competent regarding computer stuff. And my input is this: have you ever, EVER tried taking some corporate source code and modified/compiled it? It’s a PAIN! Sure, open source allows you to fiddle around how much you want, but it only appeals to the really, really hardcore users of something, who also just happen to either have the money to hire a qualified programmer to edit whatever they feel needs changing or have the knowledge to edit the source code themselves. It is a gauntlet of finding exactly the right compiler, fix the setting, change the settings so that it can accomodate your new features while at the same time retaining support of the old stuff, learning about all the (mostly) platform specific libraries that are being used. And that is provided it is not some mega gamuth of a program that like, requires a cluster network working 24/7 for 2 days on compiling it.
Having “open source” as a selling argument is like saying: “yeah, you can change anything on this new car you are going to buy, you can make it fly if you want!”, yes, provided that you have the knowledge and the parts! Most times it is just better to buy a flying car if you really need it.
As much as I dislike the way Microsoft treats their users, I hate GNU with equal fervor. I run different OS’es and I hate them all! The only OS that I have ever used that did not make me go nuts was windows nt.
There is no “correct way” to model, only a preferred way. You get the same results either way you approach it.
I’ve read a few of your comments, and you keep insisting you are not bad mouthing Blender, when its fairly obvious that you are. Who cares that its not industry standard software? The principals for modeling/texturing/animating across ALL 3D software is exactly the same, it’s just different approaches are taken through the various software packages available.
Just because people are using free open source software with a greater feature-set than Max/Maya, doesn’t mean its any less important.
The grass-roots nature of blender and other open source makes it imperative to investigate !!! And just you try to get a major sw application company to respond well to a feature request! HA
The real goal for cg artists is to learn the concepts and FILM DIRECTION, not just any specific program.
Blender is the great leveler of 3D.
More tuts like this, please — helps EVERYONE, independent of Software!
The difficult part of the blender is to memorize all the shortcut. But once you got it, you’ll gonna be as smooth as riding a roller coaster. After you finish you feels like you want to do it again…
That is brilliant!
Excelente, celebro con todos la existencia de este nuevo enlace, espero que siga creciendo como sus paginas heramanas..
Muchas gracias y mucja suerte.
omg, your twitter account is suspended…….. Why?
amazing!i love animation and 3d stuff because it’s like my dream job to be in Pixar!
Nice Blender Tuts, just waiting for the 2.5 version with its new GUI
this is really amazing tuts.
Very useful. Helped me a lot.
Only reason Blender’s UI seems difficult is not knowing where things are.
I used 3ds MAX for years and wouldn’t touch Blender. Last year I decided to force myself into trying it out for a month. Spent time on a few tutorials and tried things out myself. Experimented with as many of the features as I could figure out.
After a months time I was hooked and realized Blender’s UI is in fact intuitive and quite fast to work with.
If everyone would just force themselves to try it out for at least a minimum of 2 weeks. I think they’d change their minds how easy it really is to get things done in Blender.
Some of the best FREE Blender tutorials I’ve ever found were from this site:
http://www.gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html
The video tutorials cover all the basics and a lot of advanced techniques.
wow, so many replies.
nothing beats the stupidity of a good ol’ “my 3d app is better than yours” flamewar.
Thanks for the tutorial. I will try it. In my life is space for more than one 3D app. ;-)
Re: many above: Blender doesn’t have to be ugly. You can theme it.
Great tutorial – thank you. More blender please. Animation, scene building, export possibilities…
You have no idea how happy I am! Thanks!
Why people have to say “you should’ve used (“industry standard software” here) instead ?
Is it the same with other software tuts ?
3dsmax should’ve used maya , modo tut should’ve have used silo ?
Very nice to see a Blender tutorial.
I’m glad to see awesome tutorials of this AWESOME 3D suite.
I hope it will not make PLUS Blender tutorials. It would be an irony, because, FREE SOFTWARE = PAY FOR TUTORIAL ??
Yes, that would irritating. Actually, I’m currently working on a roundup of Blender
tutorials. I am hoping it turns out OK.
Keep me informed, plz
ggrosso.dg@gmail.com
Amazing tutorial.
Although you made the sculpt seems soooo easy…. and is fucking hard! lol but then I read: “with specialization in sculpture”…..
Thanks
awesome
Great tutorial.
For those of you who are complaining about blender’s interface, you just aren’t used to it. I don’t find anything hard to get to in blender. It’s much more accessible than in Max or Maya from my experience, and there are tons of tools, and it’s all in about 15mb (depending on the OS) too!
this tutorial was awesome, but i thinks , thank the don show all the blender sculp blender features, like axis lock o axis simetry or de curve editor for the brush and also is posible to use a texture to sculp.
Thank you, a very good tutorial
wow..nice tutorial
Thanks for the help, Karen,
But I can’t get it to work. Every time I try the first BAKE, I get a
“No image to bake to” error. :(
Zarąbisty tutorial (SUPER)
¡Coméeeeee toto del ocote!
Thanks for the good tutorial! It is just what I need.
Please, make more Blender tutorials with quality like this one!
Hi, thanks a lot for this great tutorial :)
Unfortunately I’ve problem in 24/25/26 steps. Normal maps are not baking correctly for me [its triangular]
I’m using Blender 2.49b. Here is a link to the baked normal map.
Best Regards
You need to set your mesh to smooth, I got the same problem you had.
http://www.turboimagehost.com/p/2140480/skull_normal.jpg.html
Same here :/
Select the object (when in object mode) and then press Set smooth button in editing panels (F9).
or
In the edit mode, Select all vertices and press W to bring out special menu and select set smooth.
Hi
this is a Great tutorial,
I loved the detailed explanation of the sculpting tools.
I Have a problem , when I get to step 40 and preview the skull, the skull appears to be a negative image, by that I mean the blacks are white and the whites are black. I am probably overlooking something very basic, but has anyone help me out here?
If you get a “No image to bake to” error, try to select the mesh in Object mode AND Solid mode
Really nice tutorial, Karan – does exactly what I’ve been looking for. Too many tutorial writers don’t realize: we may already get the *concepts*, we’d just like a nice step-by-step so we can see how to actually *execute* them. This tutorial scored 100% in that respect – I’ve understood the whole idea of baking high-poly features to low-poly meshes for quite a while (some great reading on that out there), but no tutorial I’d read has simply laid out the steps as smartly and simply as you have. Excellently done!
Hi, I have problem at step 17. I get the error ‘Operation only available for multires level 1′ when I try to mark the seams. There are no holes or gaps in my model, and I’ve chosen the exact vertices in the screenshot. Any ideas?
It is good to add Mirror modifier with Y axis to the object before sculpting. Good for symetry and saves much work…
ff
Jack: Guess you forgot to press “Apply multires” before marking seam. It occured me also, when I forgot it.
But I have another problem: when I do as it is said on Step 23, nothing happens, the two models dont cover each other – and when I try to bake it after, it reports that no image found…
Guess this is all too complicated, there are so many things that may go wrong that it is almost impossible to end it succesfully. I dont believe there are many people (and many computers) who can do such tutorials…:-o
Hmmm, then, I make through all the steps, it works, but I have some ugly work, not the skull I have sculpted… :-( F**k off this method – vertice modelling is much better…
Thanks,
It is a good website and I appreciate your work
Great tutorial.
I got stuck when baking the model as my image always ending up being 1 single color (blue). When i select camera instead of tangent i do get the details though….
Great Tutorial, and very useful! Thanks!