Renzatic on 27/8/2016 at 18:31
Quote Posted by Yakoob
One day I will be as good as Renz... in the meantime:
Which is funny, because...
A. If I were to make a game now, it'd look a lot like that shot you just posted.
B. I can't say I'm good, because while I can do some high poly modeling, I can't get them into a game.
Seriously, I don't know what it is about baking down that presents such a huge mental block for me, but it's just something I can't seem to do. I bet I spent 10 hours screwing up every attempt to bake down that robot before throwing my hands in the air, and proclaiming I'm crap at it.
Nameless Voice on 27/8/2016 at 19:25
What are Blender's baking tools like?
In 3DSMax you can make both the high-poly and low-poly models, and get it to automatically bake the high poly model into a normal map for the low-poly one. Not something I've experimented with very much, but it seemed fairly straightforward when I tried it.
Renzatic on 27/8/2016 at 20:02
Pretty decent, from what I hear.
The ease of it seems to depend entirely upon the complexity of the model. Like if you have lots of flat surfaces, it's easy as pie. You just lay your low poly in over your high, maybe bevel a few edges to get your curved corners in, and hit the bake button. But when it comes to things that have lots of curves, like the robot above, it seems to spaz out, and give you entirely random results depending on how the rays are curving from the high to the low.
From what I understand, there's a very specific way you have to lay out a low poly model to get it to pick up all the details properly. Otherwise, your details get rendered with the normals shooting in all kinds of strange directions. Honestly, what I need to do is sit down and do some very, very tedious tutorialing, both on baking and retopologizing.
Nameless Voice on 28/8/2016 at 13:22
I had a quick try of Gather, but was somewhat put off by the tiny window size and the fact that the mouse cursor really didn't work (the "replacement" pointer would only move if I clicked somewhere in the game screen, and it kept wanting to hide my real pointer.)
Maybe some combination of NoScript and AdBlock interfering with things?
WingedKagouti on 28/8/2016 at 14:09
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
Maybe some combination of NoScript and AdBlock interfering with things?
NoScript is very likely to be the culprit.
Yakoob on 29/8/2016 at 05:52
Sounds like it. It was necessary tho, without locking your cursor it was easy to accidentally move the mouse outside the window and end up hilighting random text and scrolling halfway down. It was a big issue in testing
Fafhrd on 29/8/2016 at 06:19
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Pretty decent, from what I hear.
The ease of it seems to depend entirely upon the complexity of the model. Like if you have lots of flat surfaces, it's easy as pie. You just lay your low poly in over your high, maybe bevel a few edges to get your curved corners in, and hit the bake button. But when it comes to things that have lots of curves, like the robot above, it seems to spaz out, and give you entirely random results depending on how the rays are curving from the high to the low.
From what I understand, there's a very specific way you have to lay out a low poly model to get it to pick up all the details properly. Otherwise, your details get rendered with the normals shooting in all kinds of strange directions. Honestly, what I need to do is sit down and do some very, very tedious tutorialing, both on baking and retopologizing.
The normal map baking in the Cycles rendering engine is significantly better than in Blender Internal. You can mess around with offsets or create cage meshes if you want. Cage meshes are more time consuming, but you'll ultimately get better baking results. You still have to be careful not to have weird overlaps in your meshes, though.
Renzatic on 29/8/2016 at 14:55
Speaking of which, how much do you know about the cycles renderer, specifically its procedural texture generation? At a casual glance, it looks comparable to something like Substance Designer, but deep info on it is surprisingly rare, considering how well documented Blender otherwise is.
Fafhrd on 30/8/2016 at 03:59
I don't know enough. It can get Substance Designer-esque results, but it takes about ten times more work to get them, as I understand it. I've never used Substance Designer, but from videos it looks like 'click three buttons and have awesome spec and roughness maps in a couple of seconds.' If you know what the underlying algorithms are that Substance uses you can probably chain together a node tree that'll do the same thing, but there are some other things that I've seen Substance Designer do that Cycles straight up doesn't.
Two good videos for what you can do with Cycles procedurals are (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAUmLcXhUj0) Bartek Skorupa's BConf talk from a couple years back. (It's mostly focused on procedural wood textures, but with some imagination you can use a lot of his tricks for other stuff), and Andy Goralczyk's (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c33QjOzH2uM) scene walkthrough for his sci-fi armour concept thing. He gets started on the materials/textures ~10 minutes in. (it's not 100% procedural, since he's using three image textures and then manipulating them procedurally, but I can't argue with his results).
