maya 6.5 normals map question

[G0st]

ok im not too too sure if im understanding right, but just to check, do you want to apply a high poly version in Maya to a low poly version, or just see the Normal Map on the low poly?

[zinks]

i played around with getting a work around for zbrush with similar idea as what u have here... the way i did it was to apply the bump map as a displacement map in maya... then u can go to modify->convert displacement to poly... this may take awhile and depending on the settings u use as far as how high the displacement is, u can get some funny results with polys overlapping so i would suggest doing only a small ammount of offset... ok so ur mesh on the high res will be ridiculously high poly... i hope ur machine is a pretty big beast... ok so u have ur high and low... now make normal maps as u would otherwise in maya by selecting both meshes and yadda yadda... i found that this can work but zbrush is really the tool for this mainly because the results of normal map generation can vary and zbrush allows for more real time turn around with the results... i found that tru maya the results were not as good and it took awhile to get them... where as in zbrush its been a much smoother experience generating normal maps esp if u use the zmapper plugin

[dstammel]

ok thanks alot. Saddly i don't have access to Zbrush so i'm gonna try it the maya way. I though ti might have to do the displacement thingy.
I'll give it a whirl...i'll mostlikely post some work in progress before i do that anyway.

thanks again
david

[CGmonkey]

transfer surface information under "lighting" or "shading" or something..

[se7enthcin]

You can also use nvidia's normalmapper plugin for photoshop. You can get it off of the nvidia website. You can turn bumpmaps into normalmaps. I've never actually tried it but from what I hear, it works.

[UnAlternate]

first you bake the highpoly to the lowpoly using transfer surface information without worrying about the bumpmap. then you convert your bumpmap to a normalmap using the photoshop plugin from nvidia, and simply put your converted normalmap as an overlay over the generated normalmap in photoshop and merge it all down to one layer. voila. just don't forget to run it all through the nvidia plugin again once merged with the conversion set to "normalise only". good luck. :)

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