Poly decimate and normal maps?

[pyromania]

You can generate normal maps in maya with the rayDisplace plugin.

http://www.drone.org/tutorials/normal_maps.html

Or you can use the stand alone normal mapper, ORB

http://www.soclab.bth.se/practices/orb.html

[gga]

Maya does not quite have all the tools you need out of the box, but you can get them from the web, if you know where to look.

For decimation, on maya5 you can use polyreduce with or without Artisan. For other maya versions, there's a plugin called progressive mesh (see highend3d). You may need to recompile progressive mesh for the latest version of maya (source is free, thou).

For normal baking, there's a free mray shader you can obtain from www.drone.org for both 4.5 and 5.0. Using mray will also allow you to bake any G.I. solution, if you decide to use that, too.

If you prefer to use just the maya renderer, there's a rayBake solution that you can buy from www.lightengine3d.com.

Also, if you are getting half life2, it is supposed to come with a lite version of xsi, which should also offer a way to do this.

[gga]

Forgot one option for maya.

There's also bakeAir, which seems to produce better results, according to drone, but you will need a way to generate a rib file with shaders attached.
If you are not too familiar with hacking ribs/SL, you may want to take a look at mayaman/mtor as a solution to that.

[Gremlin]

hmm, I'll have to check it out (some of this sounds like gibberish to me, so I gotta read up on some of those readme's or something) :D
Cheers,
:beer:

[thomaspecht]

read about how to do it in maya with freeware-plugins/scripts here: http://cube.phlatt.net/forums/spiraloid/viewtopic.php?TopicID=9&page=0
but read the forum rules, before you post something ;)

orb works pretty fine, btw.

[Levitateme]

since there seem to be a few people here who know about normal maps. does anyone know why when i bake my normal map from my high res character, i get like chekerd specs on the normal image? there on ly in a few places like the persons feet, if anyone has any ideas i would be MORE THAN happy...to send the scene, i emailed oliver, he asked for the scene, emailed me once. then i guess he had to giv eup on it.

[Gremlin]

*bump*

thanx... I think i'll be able to do it in maya, which is good to know I'll be able to use 3dsmax and/or maya depending on which is best for the team :D
Cheers,
:beer:

[thomaspecht]

is it maybe caused in areas where geometry is overlapping or very wrinkled - sideparts of toes, fingers, etc? i had a lot of problems there when doing normal maps for the first time. it happens where lo-and hi-res mesh used for normalmap-calculation do intersect or the ray length is not adjusted correctly.

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