Quickly Masking a Normal Map

[Super Happy Cow]

I've been wondering, since i started building characters, how the hell do people quickly mask maps, rather than spending hours painting out individual pieces? There must be a way using selection options.

Example: Goat from the sdk thread. Hope the author doesn't mind.

http://img541.imageshack.us/img541/8689/sheepcopy.jpg

[Bal]

The idea is to set colours on your hipoly and bake that information down to your low poly.
There are many ways to achieve this, vertex colours, UVs with a multicoloured maps, just using coloured materials in max/maya/etc...

[cw]

strange timing that you mention this! :) see the textools thread,
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69736&page=8

[ZacD]

XSI has an option called material tags that creates different colored ares for each material.

[pior]

Yeah its a very basic thing, it's easy to forget but it takes 5 minutes to setup and saves hours when working on the texture.
If you bake inside Max or Maya, its just a matter of transferring the diffuse info ; but other applications can import either vertex colors or texture info to do that too.

[r_fletch_r]

Vertex colours work in max. In the material put a vertex colour node in the diffuse slot and bake the diffuse channel.
It'd be damn nice to have a vertex colour channel. Infact something like scripted render passes would be awesome.