I’ve read/watched various tutorials on creating normal maps from high poly models or from existing textures, but I’m having a hard time finding anything on how to texture a low poly model with a normal map attached to it. If I UV unwrap the low poly model, the UV’s don’t show the details from the high poly version. So how do I texture the details if I can’t see them.
For example, lets say I’m building a sci-fi panel with various small knobs, switches, and pipes. I would create a high poly version of it and then bake a normal map onto a plane. Everything at this point is just the default color of the material. If I export the UV’s, it would just be a square with no reference to where the knobs, switches, and pipes are, making it really hard to texture the individual parts.
Do I UV unwrap the high poly version and texture that first and then put it on the low poly version, or is there a better way?
You could bake the ambient occlusion too so you have a base image for your color texture with all the detail from your high poly.
yeah, AO helps a lot.
you can also generate cavity/curvature map in xnormal photoshop plugin. both are useful and do different things so get both.
also, sometimes i put normal map above diffuse map and set it to overlay. this way you can see where details are and check how texture would look with lighting.
Thanks for the replies. To bake an AO map, would I have to unwrap the UV’s for the high poly model, or can I just do it like a normal map where I only have to to unwrap the low poly version?
Like normal maps. You don’t need the high poly uvs.
Just bring the normal maps in your image editor.Make sure to desaturate them and paint above them.You can get some interesting results if you bring the ambient occlusion as well.This is how I setup layers in Gimp!
1)above everything - Uvs
2)under uvs - normal maps ( desaturated ) in overlay mode
3)under normal maps - ambient occlusion map in multiply mode.
everything else under them in normal mode(usually)