Game Development Community

Baking Normals

by Brett Williams · in Artist Corner · 10/07/2009 (3:38 pm) · 4 replies

I've been digging around for a while, but I can't seem to find a good run-thru on baking normals in Houdini. Has anyone found any decent resources?
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Artist Corner


Torque Owner Peter Stuart
#1
10/09/2009 (2:47 pm)
It isn't everything you need, but here is a link on odforce about shader unwrapping: http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/ShaderUnwrap

Instead of using a custom mantra command, you can use the UV Object parameter with "Edit Rendering Settings" (filter on "uvobject").

You'll have to make a shader that outputs the normals, which is the tricky part. Object space normals would be easy, but it looks like torque uses tangent space normals which is a little trickier. I can probably help with that. I'll see if I can get something to work...

Torque Owner Peter Stuart
#2
10/09/2009 (3:48 pm)
Also - do you want to use the normals from a high res mesh on a low res mesh or just bump mapping?

Torque 3D Owner Brett Williams
#3
10/12/2009 (1:32 am)
Yeah, the goal was to be able to bake normals from a high res mesh for use on a low poly optimized dts. I'll take a look at what you've provided, thanks.

I'm not sure this is going to be possible, depending on if Houdini HD limits the output size of images with the Torque license. Will have to investigate.

Torque Owner Peter Stuart
#4
10/12/2009 (7:07 pm)
I made a tool that might help. It renders the object space normals of the high res geometry, and then renders a second pass that takes in the first pass image and converts it to a tangent space normal map for the low res geometry. There is a restriction in that the low res and high res geometry have to have similar uvs. Would this be helpful to you? This is probably a stupid question, but how do I upload it to the forum?