This continues on from the tutorial that I started last week. I've improved the leaf geometry with guidance from the tutorial, implementing the technique of bevelling in the corners of the leaf's outline to give it a more organic shape. The amount of polygons in this model doesn't matter, as it's going to be used to create the ambient occlusion, normal and opacity maps, which will then be projected onto a plane.
The main veins of the leaf are extruded and bevelled, this will create height in the maps.
I deleted the faces on the back as only the front is needed as a source for creating the maps.
The lattice tool is used to give the leaf curvature. Doing this will create some more shadows and different heights on the leaf. What this does is when the normal map is created, it mimics where light and shadows would fall on this high poly version. When I bake these maps onto a plane, it will appear like a 3D object even though it is actually a flat surface. This is very important for something like leaves, which need to be used in great numbers to look realistic and therefore need to be confined to a single face - using lots of leaves at 30+ tris would just be the wrong way to go about it.
This is the first ambient occlusion map of the leaf. You can see it has some very dark shadows which is good, that's exactly what I need for creating my normal map - contrast!
Before I can continue this part of the tutorial, I need to sort out getting a normal map filter plug-in for Photoshop as it is used in the tutorial instructions. As this is my first time learning how to make normal maps, I want to stick closely to the instructions so that I don't make any mistakes.
Before I can continue this part of the tutorial, I need to sort out getting a normal map filter plug-in for Photoshop as it is used in the tutorial instructions. As this is my first time learning how to make normal maps, I want to stick closely to the instructions so that I don't make any mistakes.
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There is another tutorial from the same book I thought would be particularly helpful to learn for my project. This one explains how to create a high-poly detailed brick wall, and how you create diffuse, ambient and normal maps to be projected onto a low-poly wall.
I created a starting brick with bevelled edges which will help to make the normal map stand out.
To give the bricks some wear and more variety, I formed some jagged shapes to place on the surfaces of two brick variations. I used the booleans extract tool to extract these shapes from the bricks, which gives them some chipped and cracked areas. Doing this on both sides of the brick means that I have the option to flip the bricks 180° once they are inserted into the wall, allowing me twice the number of variations. I also kept one brick free of chipping as another variant.
To fill my sample wall, I used the duplicate special command to fill out the wall with the unmarked bricks. I then selected random bricks to delete and replace with the chipped types. Then I made more random selections to rotate 180° on both the X and Y axes, resulting in a wall with many varying bricks.
The bricks are set into a cube which will appear as the cement in the ambient and normal maps. Here you can see how high the polycount is looking as the bricks have been multiplied - far too many if this were going to be a very long wall or the sides of the manor house.
One of the alternative methods of creating a normal map is to use a light array, though it is not as often used as other methods, I wanted to learn how to do it. I created a series of directional lights, each pair of lights positioned along the X, Y and Z axes facing each other, with the RGB values set at 1.0 for each colour. So for example, one set of lights is set at Red 1 Green 0 Blue 0, Intensity value 1.0 and the other is the same but with the intensity turned to -1.0. In my scene I have the Red lights along the Z axis, the Green along the Y axis and the Blue along the X axis. You must also use an ambient light with RGB values all set at 0.5, which intensifies the effect of all the directional lights.
I rendered using Maya Software through the side camera, and this is the result. You get quite a clear and crisp image, although I think I would need to render a larger image for use in my game level.
