3drocket
07-09-2009, 11:00 AM
Hey...
I thought this software might come in handy for some of you Mudbox users.
We developed it for a Mudbox sculpting project I am working on.
http://www.planetinaction.com/software/ncombiner.htm
The problem we had was the game engine our model gets rendered in supports normal maps but not bump mapping. The model we are working on is quite large and the camera gets very close to the surface so it was not practical/possible to model all the detail with polygons and just output a normal map as everyone does when taking the model to a programs like max or Maya to render.
We found that the best way for us was to sculpt all the larger details and then use a bump map for all the small details that were smaller than our smallest polygons.
We export a normal map and a bump map from mudbox and then used the nVidia Photoshop plugin to convert the bump map to a normal map. We then load the two normal maps into our custom software and it combines the two maps correctly. There is a better description of whats going on on the software download page.
For our project this tool has been great and we thought it should be available to anyone doing 3d sculpting. The software is free to use but we ask for a $6us donation if you find it useful.
Cheers
I thought this software might come in handy for some of you Mudbox users.
We developed it for a Mudbox sculpting project I am working on.
http://www.planetinaction.com/software/ncombiner.htm
The problem we had was the game engine our model gets rendered in supports normal maps but not bump mapping. The model we are working on is quite large and the camera gets very close to the surface so it was not practical/possible to model all the detail with polygons and just output a normal map as everyone does when taking the model to a programs like max or Maya to render.
We found that the best way for us was to sculpt all the larger details and then use a bump map for all the small details that were smaller than our smallest polygons.
We export a normal map and a bump map from mudbox and then used the nVidia Photoshop plugin to convert the bump map to a normal map. We then load the two normal maps into our custom software and it combines the two maps correctly. There is a better description of whats going on on the software download page.
For our project this tool has been great and we thought it should be available to anyone doing 3d sculpting. The software is free to use but we ask for a $6us donation if you find it useful.
Cheers