To Polycount, beginner questions.

[TheEnd]

Hey polycount artists, discovered the site a few weeks ago, recently started my second semester at UNI (1st year) for Games Modeling and Animation.

Being a beginner and all, i just have a few questions, once answered i'll know for the rest of my years, it's just things i'm not too sure / aware of, any help would be appreciated.

1. I notice all the textures here are put together in like a texture map in photoshop or what not, usually what i've been doing is saving the UV snapshot from MAYA on the 0-1 square in the uv window, taking it into photoshop, placing a texture over the polygon lines on the snapshot.

But i notice people have textures from multiple objects on one map sometimes, and have them laid out really nicely, i was just wondering if someone could take me through the process of texture maps and how they get them looking so clean and what not.


2. I want to get into enviroments, no doubt. I understand making enviroments makes use of alot of normal maps on assets and walls and what not. Just wondering if bump and normal mapping are the same, which is best for enviroments, if all assets should have normal maps along with ambient occulusion and any other goodies.


TheEnd

[Talbot]

I would suggest you check out the eat3d.com Next-Gen Texturing tutorial. Even though it's not in maya... I've seen a couple of people who have made threads about doing it in maya instead of 3ds max. I think that those tutorials and maybe checking out something the "sticky" threads in Technical Talk should answer your questions.

[AnimeAngel]

The first question there is a big topic and one that requires a lot tutorials and a lot of trial and error to fully learn the process. There are many decent tutorials around some you can find here http://www.learning-maya.com

As for your second question, Normal maps and bump maps are not the same, but they both work in similar fashion. Normal maps can be used to simulate various details and generally give much better results then a bump. Bumps are ok for adding some texturing details but generally don't do fine details very well at all. Plus the process involved in generating these two maps is drastically different.

I have found that as technologies change and evolve I see less and less use of the bump map and much more use of the normal maps. This mainly because of the level of detail a normal map can handle.
The high detail comes at a cost though, and that is that normal maps are generally much more time consuming to produce because you usually have to model a very high poly mesh and then project that onto a lower poly mesh.

So it becomes a balance of figuring out which pieces get a normal maps, a bump maps or nothing at all. Experience I think is the key here, but I would say a good rule of thumb is, if its in the players face, normal map it; if its always going to remain at a short distance, bumb map it and if the player never gets any where near it, then it gets nothing at all. This can change of course based on the project but generally that seems to be the way of it.

Hope that helps

[Richard Kain]

For an environment, I would say sticking to bump maps will be better for an ametuer. This is especially true if you are attempting to make full levels. As AnimeAngel mentioned, normal maps are much more costly in terms of time. You have to sculpt out the geometry, and then render the normal map. Doing this for main characters and important props makes sense. But sculpting out every wall detail in a level would take forever.

Bump maps are just greyscale value images. You can paint them yourself pretty quickly with little trouble. You can also use procedural textures as the base for a bump map, which makes it easier to produce tileable bump maps. (good for level textures) And then there's the performance issue. Normal mapping is more costly at render time than bump mapping. Your levels will run smoother if they are coated in bump maps as opposed to normal maps. In Doom 3, everything was normal-mapped, and most graphic cards choked when trying to run it. Half Life 2's Source engine used bump maps instead for its detail shading, and that implementation proved far more scalable in terms of hardware performance.

If you have a "set piece" for your level, you might want to consider normal-mapping it. But for general wall, floor, and cieling textures I would stick to bump mapping.