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• Rendering Techniques > Use Maya Transfer Maps Tools to Create Normal Map (Posted By: mayafishing)
• :: Post Date: 2007-04-24 19:57:10 [Post Comment] [Post Articles]

• Use Maya8.5 Transfer Maps Feature to Generate Normal Maps Software: Autodesk Maya Author: Dong Contact: yangdongmy@gmail.com Introduction Now Playstation 3 has arrived. New Generation of Games are arriving as well. One very important technique a 3D designer should know well is Normal Mapping. Before Maya 8.5, Maya uses a feature called "Surface Sampler" to generate normal maps. Now with Maya 8.5, "Suface Sampler" changed to "Transfer Maps" and brings alone a lot more useful features. "Transfer Maps" uses two meshes, one is a high polygon count model with high quality details and another is a low polygon model. The idea is to transfer surface details from high polygon count model to the lower one by generating a map called "Normal Map". The map is then applied to the lower polygon count model, when the low-poly model was rendered, the details will be shown in the final render. It is very useful in a real-time game engine where lower polygon count means better game performance. As you can see from the "Transfer Maps" window, it has many more features than Normal Mapping. But for this tutorial, we will cover the Normal Mapping only. [Click Here for Larger Image] Models Used For this tutorial, I made a crocodile model. It was subdivided in ZBrush and sculpted to get high quality details. The high-poly model has almost 1 million polygons and the low-polygon mesh is only 940 polygons. [Click Here for Larger Image] [Click Here for Larger Image] Steps to Create Normal Map and Assign it to Low-Poly Mesh 1. You need to place two models directly on top of each other to begin with. Once you have placed the models correctly, select Low-Poly mesh, and go to Rendering Module, click menu Lighting/Shading > Transfer Maps... [Click Here for Larger Image] "Transfer Maps" window will pop-up and you can see the Low-poly mesh has been added in the "Target Meshes" section. (Note: you can add as many as target meshes you want, but Maya will only generate one normal map per operation.) [Click Here for Larger Image] 2. Select the High-Polygon mesh, and in the "Source Meshes" section click "Add Selected". [Click Here for Larger Image] 3. In the "Output Maps" section, select "Normal" as the type of map you want to create. As you can see, it will give you some options such as the location to store the generated normal map, File Format, Map Space, and etc. In this case, I set the Map width and Map height to 1024px. [Click Here for Larger Image] 4. Next in the "Maya Common Output" and "mental ray Common Output" sections, set both Map width and Height width to 1024px. I did not change any other attributes. But certainly you can explore with them. Maya's help file provides detailed information on those attributes. I set the "Sampling Quality" in "Maya Common Output" section to "High (8x8)", it will give you a Normal Map with very smooth result, of course, it will increase the processing time dramatically. [Click Here for Larger Image] 5. Click on "Bake and Close", it takes a while to create the map. At the bottom of the Help Line, you can see a pregress bar. Once it's finished, open the Attribute Editor for the low-poly model. You can see in the "Bump Map" channel already hooked up with the Mormal Map, in the bump2d node's "Use As" section, the "Tangent Space Normals" option has been selected. And in the texture file node, the purple colored Normal Map is nicely sitting there. [Click Here for Larger Image] [Click Here for Larger Image] [Click Here for Larger Image] 6. Time to prepare for rendering. I chose Mental ray in this case. One important note for rendering with mental ray is that you need to go to Render Setting window, select "mental ray" tab, go to "Tanslation" > "Performance" > tick "Maya Derivatives". This option should be selected, if not, in my case, I got some weired results. [Click Here for Larger Image] Render Result The First one is the Low-Poly mesh in the viewport, and the Second one is the render result of the Low-Poly model with Normal Map applied. [Click Here for Larger Image] [Click Here for Larger Image] Important Conditions for Using "Transfer Maps" Tools There are 2 conditions you need to satisfy before you use Transfer Maps feature. 1. All Target Objects must have clean and non-overlapping UVs. 2. Subdivision Surface and NURBS are not supported. This tutorial served as an introduction on how to generate and apply Normal Maps in Maya 8.5 with "Transfer Maps" tools. When I have learned more, I will post more tutorials on this topic. Please send me any critics and suggestions on this tutorial. I am really appreciate that. Thanks for reading.

• Comments: (Currently there are 16 comments.)
• 
• • [Anonymous]Brain ( 2009-07-21 06:36:10 ) [Post Comments]

  • Very good! Thanks!

  • [Anonymous]sanardi ( 2009-02-18 05:25:32 ) [Post Comments]

  • Dong thank you very much for the tuturial, was great and was really useful. But I almost get crazy because in the result of the normal maping de low polymesh was reflected ... the only thing that's missing in the tutorial is before make the Bake you must soft the normals in the low poly mesh. Thank You very much again

  • [Anonymous]Highin3d ( 2009-01-27 04:02:51 ) [Post Comments]

  • I hope you helpe me in other parts of transfer Map , like displacement , defuse ,... . Tnx again .

  • [Anonymous]Highin3d ( 2009-01-27 04:00:38 ) [Post Comments]

  • Tnx man . It was great !

  • [Anonymous]sudheer ( 2008-11-24 17:12:28 ) [Post Comments]

  • you have done great job. thank you

  • [Anonymous]wom ( 2008-09-12 21:29:28 ) [Post Comments]

  • Wohoo! It works! it never works for me :OOOOO but this time it works! it's a miracle :D Thanks for the tutorial ^^

  • [Anonymous]Tormem ( 2008-07-09 16:42:34 ) [Post Comments]

  • Great tutorial, thanks a lot! Clear and to the point! I've two things to add: - If you (guys reading this post) want to view the normal map in real time, just go to you panel-menu>renderer and choose "high quality". - This guy uses project as well, but breaks up the mesh. Interesting enough to mention, as I'm about to try it out myself: http://en.9jcg.com/featured_artists/ben_clark/making_of_the_giant_01.php

  • [Anonymous]shouroujin ( 2008-06-09 05:04:57 ) [Post Comments]

  • greate artworks. i added my website: http://www.cgfriend.org/

  • [Anonymous] ( 2008-06-04 10:23:40 ) [Post Comments]

  • Great tutorial. You give just enough information to let us pick up where you left off. Not oversimplified, and not focused on irrelevant details.

  • [Anonymous] ( 2008-04-19 05:51:59 ) [Post Comments]

  • great job

  • [Anonymous] ( 2008-03-20 09:09:44 ) [Post Comments]

  • Very helpful thank you.

  • [Anonymous]allendoffer ( 2007-10-17 07:54:07 ) [Post Comments]

  • Thank you for taking the time and write it all so clear.

  • [Anonymous]thatipamula25 ( 2007-07-12 17:17:05 ) [Post Comments]

  • we want lighting tutorial files

  • [Anonymous]J5ive ( 2007-07-05 20:20:23 ) [Post Comments]

  • Excellent tutorial, I couldn't follow the F1 help in Maya but your tutorial was very clear and straight forward. Thank you for your time.

  • [Anonymous]wing ( 2007-06-21 10:52:41 ) [Post Comments]

  • Thanks for your offer. but there wasn't new technics. it's just description from the maya help. i need to get more information about detail option. anyway, it'll help me to make a normal map in maya. thanks.

  • [Anonymous]Stea_Demon ( 2007-06-09 03:10:40 ) [Post Comments]

  • Very good tutorial! Quick clean and to the point! 5 Stars, from me! Thanks!

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