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MoTiVe187
10-30-2005, 08:44 PM
Hey guys. I'm doing a studio I project at SCAD where I'm modling a monster from the movie The Thing (check here http://jeremycarroll.com/project1.html)
and zbrushing the maya base to create a normal map which would be applied to the low poly base. I was just wondering if anyone here knew the correlation between uvs and normal maps? I wanted to know if I had the uvs generally layed out so that I had no overlaps if I would have to lay them out so that there wasn't any distortion in the applied grid pattern as if you were laying them out for a color map? Right now I'm modeling and uving in maya 6.5, sculpting in zbrush, and using the surface sampler in maya 7 to generate the normal map. Any information you guys have using this workflow would be greatly appreciated.

I hope I wasn't too confusing in the question.
EricChadwick
11-04-2005, 03:49 PM
Less distortion in the UVs the better, since the more square you have each texture pixel, the better it will filter when rendered. Long thin stretched pixels can mean loss of detail in that area. When baking geometric detail into a texture, or using 3D paint, the UVs can be a mess and still work OK. But it makes it very difficult to add hand-painted detail in a 2D painting app like Gimp or Photoshop.
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11-04-2005, 03:49 PM
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