Скачать или смотреть Max In Minutes - 7. Generating Normal Maps in 3dsMax

In this video, I will take you through the process of creating a Normal Map in 3dsmax. The feature we will be using is Render to Texture. This will be used to bake a normal map from a high-resolution mesh to a lower resolution mesh.

A normal map is a texture used to give an object the appearance it has a lot more geometry detail than it actually has. It does this by storing the high-resolution model's surface normal/lighting information in the RGB channels of a texture. When this is applied to the low-resolution model with the correct shader it will make the low-resolution model look very similar to the high poly, but render a lot quicker making it more game engine friendly.

We will cover generating a Tangent Map, this is the map most commonly used in the games industry and is mainly blue and pink in colour.

We will start with two 3D models, A high poly source mesh and a low poly target mesh. The idea is to store the fine details of the high poly mesh in a texture map and apply that texture map to the low polygon model to make it look more detailed than it is – that’s all a normal map does.
For this tutorial we will use a fairly basic model of a wheel and a tyre. It has enough fine details with the rim and the nut and bolt detail whilst remaining a fairly basic shape.
We will start by using Render to Texture and a projection mapping technique to generate the map.

We will cover everything you need to know about the method of Ray tracing and also how to adjust the cage so that we match the high and low poly meshes closely. We’ll also cover why this is important.
I will take you through how to render the texture and how to set the various sizes of map that you might need.

Next we will move into the Material Editor and in the maps list we will use the bump slot to load up our Normal map.

We will then cover how to view your normal maps in the viewport and how to set up Hardware Display with Maps.

Sometimes Normal Maps may need a slight clean-up in Adobe Photoshop to get the best results when rendered as small artifacts in the map are often created when generating the map.
I’ll take you through the process of painting out these artifacts using Photoshop and the Nvidia Normal Map Filter Plug-in.

Although this sounds like a fairly complex tutorial, everything is set out step by step enabling you to follow it easily.

You’ll then be able to generate any number of normal maps to really help you to improve the quality of your work.