Hello everyone :).
A couple days ago i've finished to watch the course of kent : "Fundamentals of texturing".
Into the video "Map baking with blender render" (on chapter 3), i've learned how to transfer a normal map from a High-res model to a Low-res one.
I tried to do it by myself with a model that i've made: This axe ! :).
The left one is the low-poly model, the middle one, the High-poly, and the third one... My ugly final result !
As you can see from left to right, i've encounter a problem with the final result (In my mind, the final axe is suppose to looks exactly as the middle one however...that's not the case ^^)
Note that I followed the exact same way that kent did into his video. So... I understand it can be very complicated to give a perfect explanation of what's goin on here so i will not ask this ^^.
But if some of you guys, have an idea, or see something that i don't know yet wich can occurs this problem, don't hesit to tell me.
I just try to understand my mistakes (because obviously i made one at least ^^)
Hey Yannis, it's really great that you're taking the lessons and applying them to your own projects!
Normal and displacement maps are special kinds of image textures that influence how light is calculated across a surface. They create an illusion of depth by telling the light to bounce off simulated features of the surface, even though those features are not actually there.
This means that they are great for faking surface details, but can't change the underlying mesh in any way. The problem with your high poly mesh is that it doesn't match the silhouette of the low poly mesh, so the bake tries to stamp the high poly shape over top of the low poly shape. In order for the bake to look good, the shapes have to match.
When I place the high poly over the low poly, you'll notice that it looks pretty close to how your bake turned out:
If you're looking to dive a bit deeper into how normal maps work, I'd recommend reading this article: https://cgcookie.com/articles/normal-vs-displacement-mapping-why-games-use-normals
And take these courses when you're ready:
https://cgcookie.com/course/texturing-game-assets-with-blender
https://cgcookie.com/course/intro-to-normal-map-modeling-for-games
Hey jonathan ! :)
A HUGE thank you for the compliment, and for having explained me what i did wrong.
I gonna read your article :)