This tutorial will show you how to build a brick arch and then bake diffuse and normal maps from a high poly model using the projection modifier.
Baking multiple maps using the Projection Modifier in 3dsmax8 by Michael Bartlett
Introduction.
In this tutorial you will learn how to produce diffuse maps and normal maps in 3dsmax using the projection modifier. As an example I’ll show you how to make a simple brick archway.
I hope I can explain this in a simple way, as it’s really quite a simple technique. In fact I wouldn’t call this an advance tutorial at all but it does require some modeling skill as well as a lot of time if you wish to extend this tutorial into your own project and add more detail to the mesh, which I hope you do.
1. Setting up the grid for use with Doom3.
1. Open the Customize/Units Setup tab and set the display unit scale to Metric
2. Open the Customize/Grid and snap settings tab and follow the image below
2. Making a brick.
READ THIS, this brick is slightly larger than your every day, average brick, I decided early on in this project to make the bricks this size as they fit into e.g. a 512x512 texture much easier than if I was to use a scale brick. Just thought you might like to know incase your fussy about that sort of stuff. If you want to create a different size brick, or a building stone, anything, go ahead. In fact you could build it entirely out of old Cereal boxes if you wanted to, whatever you like. It won’t affect the outcome of this tutorial.
1. Turn on Snaps Toggle
and make a box; length: 8, width: 16 and height: 6
2. With the box selected open the Hierarchy tab,
Select Affect pivot only and then center to object, the pivot should now be in the centre of the box.
3. Scale the brick to 97.0 that’s 97%, this will allow room for mortar so dont do this if you want the bricks sealed, the option’s yours.
4, Turn off Snaps Toggle. Chamfer the external edges slightly, this is necessary for the normal map.
5. To create the nicks and cuts seen in the image below I’ve used the cut tool in edit poly mode and then manipulated vertexes, or if you prefer you can make a few random shapes and subtract them from the brick using the Boolean tool. To get the indent which is always found on the bottom of a brick I’ve used the inset and bevel tool’s found in edit poly mode.
The brick contains about 200 poly’s so that’s 400 tris in Doom3.
6. We don’t want all the bricks to look the same, so copy the original brick and manipulate a few vertexes, cut some more with the Boolean tool if you feel it necessary.
Do this several times, take note that I’ve kept them all in the same mesh and have copied them as elements within the same editable poly.
As you can see in the image above, I’ve made 6 different ones, but they are all made from the same original brick we started with. You can also flip and rotate them to get a bit more variety.
3. Adding Colour
1. You can either use these diffuse maps or you can create your own. I’ve used 3 different ones.
The materials we’re looking at are the top three in the material editor pic below, load the brick_large01.jpg into the diffuse slot, do the same with the next 2 .jpg files.
note: You can also add a bumpmap and specular map to the material, and they will get rendered to texture too, the bumpmap gets added to the normal map and you get a much better result than you would using the nvidia plugin with photoshop and overlaying the diffuse as im pretty sure this method corrupts normalmap (changes direction of normals)
edit: There is a way to overlay the baked normalmap with the nvidia plugin properly by lowering the value of the blue channel on the overlayed map, I personally havent played with this method myself so if someone has some more info on this I can edit it in.
2. Make 2 more copy’s of the bricks, drag and drop the 3 textures onto the bricks as shown below.
4. Stacking the bricks.
1. Go into editable poly mode and start stacking the bricks into a solid wall by copying them as elements within the editable poly.
2. Then remove the bricks which will be used as a doorway, but once again you can do whatever you want.
3. Turn off snapping and use the move and rotate tools to position the bricks where you need them respective of the grid, to get the general layout do most of the work in the front view, and tweak a few bricks here and there to make it look old and distressed.
4. The doorway fits inside a 128x128x16 cube, you may notice the bricks protruding from the edges are the same as the bricks on its opposite sides, this is so that the texture will tile horizontally. If you need special bricks for a special detail then you can modify one of the original bricks, I’ve made special triangular bricks to fit around the arch and I use the slice plane tool in edit poly mode to make these.
Finally, name the object ‘bricks_01’.
5. Low poly mesh and Mortar mesh.
1. Create a new box surrounding the shape of the bricks, if you’re following the tutorial it should be 128x128x16, you’ll need to turn on snapping again for this, keep it tight.
Make another box the same shape as the opening and use the Boolean tool to cut the shape of the doorway. Name this object ‘mortar01’
2. Copy ‘mortar01’ and drag it off to the side. This will be our low poly mesh so name it ‘brickdoor01_low. (remember to keep it snapped to the grid!)
3. Select ‘mortar01’ again and ‘convert to editable poly’ then right click in the viewport and ‘Isolate selection’.
Chamfer the inside edges of the arch and divide a few poly’s on the front and back of the arch using the cut tool as shown below, push and pull a few vertexes here and there to give the mortar a bit of shape.
Apply the appropriate material to ‘mortar01’.
4. Exit Isolation mode. Go into vertex mode and start manipulating vertexes so that you expose some, if not all of the brick like in the pic below.
6. UVW Mapping the Low Poly Model
1. Select the low poly model and add an ‘Unwrap UVW’ modifier to it.
2. I’m not going to try and explain to you how to unwrap a model for a UVW map. Personally, even after reading the tutorials that came with max I found that its just one of those things you learn with experience, by doing.
Another good way to get some good tips on UVW mapping is to open up the skins from games and compare them to their relative models, see how the pros do it.
However, this is a pretty simple model to unwrap though, so you shouldn’t have a problem. If you do have a problem, just refer to the image below.
7. Projection
1. Place the low poly model over the bricks and mortar. (Remember to keep it snapped to the grid)
2. Add a Projection modifier to the stack, click on ‘Pick list’ and select both the bricks and the mortar and click the ‘add’ button.
3. You’ll notice the blue cage surrounding ‘brickdoor01_low’ has gone a bit crazy now (oops). In the cage menu click the ‘Reset’ button and it should go back to normal.
4. Still focusing on the cage, turn on shaded and push the cage so that it’s surrounding the bricks.
NOTE: any part of the high poly model outside of the cage won’t get projected onto the low poly model therefore; the cage must surround every part of the high poly model.
5. From the Rendering pull down menu, open ‘Render to Texture’, (the low poly model must be selected for this.)
6. In the Projection mapping menu tick the ‘Enable’ box.
In the Output menu add both the ‘DiffuseMap’, 'Specularmap' and the ‘NormalsMap’
Set the size to whatever you want, I’ve chosen 1024 but we can always resize them later on.
7. In the ‘File Name and Type’ slot, type in the path of where you want to save the images and save them as ‘.tga’ files
8. Finally, click the ‘Render’ button at the bottom. Don’t worry about what you see in the render window, the maps will by saved appropriately.
Well that’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and benefit from it, if you come across a problem and need some help then feel free to ask.
By the way, this is my first ever tutorial so some feedback and suggestions would by great.
edit: added diffuse map .jpg files
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