I think you are doing the process with 3ds max with the cage and all? I don't want to stop you from doing that, because sometimes its better to know how to do it in various different ways, but xnormals already sets the cage and everything. Maybe you already know about it, but just saying. It helps alot. Imo of course.
I will look into this xnormals thing because you have mentioned it afew times Lol.
Not sure what you are doing to make it look like that, but if you are using the default cage that it makes for you, don't.
Reset the cage and manually expand it out a very tiny bit - you want it as close as possible to the HP model without the cage intersecting any of it. Basically, expand it out a tiny bit so that it covers most of the HP and for the parts where it is intersecting, select the vertices for that part of the cage and manually expand them out.
Also, if you are using more than one smoothing group on the low poly model, give the entire gun a single smoothing group. If you have smoothing errors than fix them and try again.
If you haven't already watched it, that one AK47 tutorial that someone posted a while ago probably covers baking out decent normal maps - if not, check the thread where I linked you to a million things.
Make sure your low poly has all the same smoothing group when baking as well if your unwrap doesn't have a different island for each smoothing group change.
split your smoothing groups according to your UV's
(if there's a UV seam, make sure there's a smoothing-seam as well)
also, dont use Xnormal, or any other bullshitp program that lets you pull magic stuff out of your ass all you need are max and photoshop, and if you actually KNOW what you're doing, you can use crazybump as well. anything else is completely obsolete and only shittifies our workflow in general.
Workin on a pitch for a space shooter descent style game. Here's some quick concepts I threw together to show the good (first image) and the bad (second image) ships.
The other artist for our team said not to shade them, he was even iffy in wanting to add any color... but I think they look even more horribly unfinished without any color.
The second one's not really that great, but honestly it far surpasses the first one. The first is just a nondescript blob. Design it with a purpose in mind, and shape it accordingly.
Originally Posted by IceCube
I think you are doing the process with 3ds max with the cage and all? I don't want to stop you from doing that, because sometimes its better to know how to do it in various different ways, but xnormals already sets the cage and everything. Maybe you already know about it, but just saying. It helps alot. Imo of course.
Its better to learn something authentically than to rely on an application, Xnormals is for lazy people who dont enjoy the self satisfaction of a good bake :P
ye
There is enough tutorials and videos out there on how to bake correctly.
Are you honestly ragging on an app that some people find easier to use? As long as the quality of the bakes are the same, what does it matter? It honestly sounds like you two (dee and malloy) have no idea what you're talking about, because it's not like you can do a "fake" bake. Using xNormal, maya, or any other kind of program (which can bake) is just as legitimate of a way to go about baking as using 3ds max.
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