Normal Mapping?
 

In class today, my teacher showed me how to do normal mapping in maya, by taking a high rez object and converting its mapping on to a low rez object. Its kinda cool that maya had the tool built in all along, although.. he showed once the conversion was made. Only in real-time high rendering you could see the difference, when you rendered it.. it would show the low poly object without any change? Does anyone know a way around that without having to take a screen capture or using a game engine?

Nvidia has some plug-ins for special materials that would react to lights and let you see the normal map results. i don't have the link offhand, but you should be able to find it at their site.

... conect the out color of the normal map to the normal camera of the shader... render normally...

TIP: one thing ive noticed when normalmapping is that if it finds 2 heights at the same spot it doesnt takes the greatest one but crashes... so to make complex patterns like the chainmail or scales youll have to make a displacement map frist, then apply it to the mesh then convert displacement to polys and THEN those polys to normal map

(I still hate uvmapping and making tiles...)

the image on the right is just a plane with a blinn and the normalmap connected to the "camera normal" of the blinn

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Yeah that works for renders. The Nvidia plugins let you see the results in real-time.

Thanx for the info, I'll have to pass that on to my teachers and give it ago.