Making of Varga In MAYA - Tutorials Directory

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Making of Varga In MAYA

By: www.paultosca.com

I will summarize the workflow I used for one of my characters with lots of images and some print-screens directly from the applications used (Maya/Mudbox/Photoshop, etc ...), also at the end I will provide some info about tangent space normal maps so...

Added: 25 June 2008 Views: 43946

Path : Computers

3D Graphics

Maya

Keywords: computers maya marga creation object mapping design graphics

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The fun part is that now that you have the layer styles in place, you can just go and adjust the size in pixels for the effect and play with all the other attributes within bevel and emboss. If you want to "carve" detail you just have to change the direction in the bevel and emboss from up to down for the red and green layer styles, you can blur the selections with Gaussian blur to achieve smoother results. You can duplicate this set and alter the attributes again and do all kinds of crazy stuff. It's up to you to experiment. You can even place the layer sets on top of other normal maps and will display ok (just run NVIDIA normal map filter with the normalize option on the final texture).

Below I was fooling around for a couple of minutes duplicating the layer set I had built earlier, filling the layers within the sets with some selections and altering the attributes for the effects, the normals are not 100% accurate as if it was done with real geometry (because of the rendering done by the bevel and emboss style). But if you set the attributes accordingly, you can barely notice it.

Try to make a normal map like this with geometry in less than 15 minutes ... I'll bet you can't . This technique was used for Peril (the bow).

Wire

With Normal Map

And the Full Textured Model Another thing you could do is to overlay two normal maps inside Photoshop, I have seen a lot of people actually setting the blend mode to overlay and call that final. This is not quite a good method and I will show you why in the next image. Let's say we want to overlay the normal map in the right on top of the left one; you can see how the blue channel is looking for each map and how it should look for the combined image. But when setting the mode to overlay, because the blue channel is almost white, it will completely wipe out any detail in the blue channel and the composite normal map will look wrong.

Below is the final composite map when set to overlay; we're completely wiping out the information about the normal component so the overlay mode for blending is a BIG NO NO NO

A better way to combine them is to set the red and green channels to overlay and the blue channel to multiply ... now how in the world I will do that?? Well, duplicate the second layer (the layer that was supposed to be set to overlay mode), one layer will be set to overlay, the other with multiply. Now, for the layer set on overlay I should neutralize the information in the blue channel by selecting a neutral gray (128 128 128) and by filling the blue channel with this color -- that will be ctrl+3 (to go to blue channel) and alt+backspace (to fill it with neutral grey, assuming the FG color will be 128 128 128), this layer should now look like this when viewed on its own.

For the second layer set to multiply, I should neutralize the red and green channels in respect to multiply blending mode (that would be to fill them with white), so set white as FG color and ctrl+1 (to go to red channel) and alt+backspace to fill with white, same for green ctrl+2 and alt+backspace; the second layer should look like the image below when viewed on its own.

Below is a comparison between the two methods, obviously the combination overlay/multiply is the way to go. If the vectors stored in the normal map are normalized, then the red and green channel will suffice because the normal component can be computed from the tangent, bi-tangent and the calculation should be done when displaying. If this is the case then a simple overlay will work fine because the info in the blue channel won't be used, but most apps will use the blue channel as well, so you should go for overlay/multiply combination.

Of course for the example above you could just make a selection and overlay them with normal mode, but most of the time you will have details in both maps that need to be overlaid.

Now that you know how to combine normal maps, you're probably asking why would you ever want to do that? Well, I will give you some examples.

After you finish the diffuse textures, you can create a bump map with fine detail (pores in skin and other granularities like leather , cloth ... etc), then use NVIDIA filters to create a normal map that will be overlaid on top of the normal map computed from geometry (this way the fine detail from diffuse and normal will register correctly).

It can help you in other situations as well:

When I sculpted the torso for Varga I forgot to sculpt the scar of the missing breast and later on when I realized that I had some weird problems with the scenes and could not load them so I just sculpted a scar on a new plane and overlaid it on top.

Also when I was sculpting Umbra, I went too far with the number of polygons and later on realized I was too timid with the musculature -- but it was too late...I had already broken the model into pieces ...

To remedy the situation I started sculpting the muscles on a new plane using a temporary normal map baked from an earlier version as my guide, then I computed a normal map between this geo and a quad plane and overlaid it on top of the old normal map to reinforce the muscles.

A Final Image with Umbra And below are the models with the final "super-tweaked" normal maps

That pretty much covers all I wanted to say in this tutorial and if you read it so far, probably there was something that caught your attention. Thank you for reading.