Thanx and yeah it's just a colour map and a bump

Haven't stopped on this just yet. Am doing the wings and just finished the UVs for the hull. Am juggling ideas on how to make a damn normal map. Either I do it (for the hull) in Zbrush which is hard with 2mill polys or I draw a bump map and then convert that into a normal map in PS. Or use the bump map in Zbrush as a Disp map to make a normal map from (so as to retain the overall smoothness of the hull surface). But it can be hard to get the right details in PS because the UVs arent completely straight.

I think I may just have to generate the normal in Zbrush even though it's kinda tedious but we will see.


http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/4...del006ccs7.jpg

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/7615/model005nt2.jpg

Well I have been trying different things with normal maps and haven't been able to achieve a good way to make flawless maps. The best so far I would say is using Maya's surface sampler but in making my hull it would mean I'd have to make a high res version which wouldn't be easy. So if anyone has nay suggestions as to what the best method might be for making the model kinda look like this concept that would be great.

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/2...hterpicvh4.jpg

I had the same problem in Maya 8 with the normal maps, so ur not alone.

Why not put this as a sub-D model and add the details then and convert back to poly and then use bump maps and textures?

If you've got Z brush cant you do the high poly work in there thee import back to maya and generate the normal map?

Ok well had a bit of a break from this as normal maps was frustrating. Just now for the tenth time I tried Zbrush but the poly count had to be around 3.5 mill so it was just too hard to make anything with let alone figure out all the optimum settings for a normal map etc etc.

So I went back to maya and played around till I found that the prob with the PS normal maps was the maya shading network wasn't good enough. So all fixed now and hardware view looks great and PS is the best option to make details in. So will have updates soon as I can get something looking good;)

preview test. And if anyone else wants to know the 'easy' way of normal mapping their model just ask :)

http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5303/test1fu2.jpg

Update on it. Gonna do more later on and finish the major components such as wings etc

http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/7683/test4mv2.jpg

http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/5749/test4bau2.jpg

I'm asking ;). I had the same issue as you, so please do tell :bow:

It wasn't too difficult to figure out. I just remembered an old tutorial which discussed it but seemed outdated.

In relation to the network needed, I use to connect the normal map to a bump node which then hit the shader. But now it seems better when you just add the normal map to the shader via outColour - normalCamera. But in any case I still can't get it to render in software yet. Have tried the killeroo network but it just doesn't seem to work. Looks great in the viewport with high quality shading though.

And if you want to make normal maps in Photoshop the same way as you would make a bump map or disp, just download the Nvidia normal map plug-in. Simple as that;)