Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
this essentially means creating the form twice, which can take some serious
time. Although for characters that will be seen throughout a game, this could
well be a worthwhile technique.
The second method is to use some of the relatively new tools on the market
(ZBrush or Mudbox) to paint normal maps. Essentially what these packages
are doing is creating higher-resolution copies of a form that are sculpted
(in some really fun ways) in these applications and then normal maps
are generated and applied to their lower-resolution cousin. Especially for
character work ZBrush and Mudbox are some really awesome tools. They
have become ubiquitous in game character creation. If character design and
creation are your thing, be sure to get your hands on one of these tools
(I prefer Mudbox because it interfaces well into Maya, but there are fantastic
results coming out of both packages).
The third method is the method we will be exploring—extracting a normal
map from a color map. Up to this point we have been defining a surface
by the color attributes alone. A rock wall is painted to look like a rock wall.
However, this painted rock wall is flat without any of the real peaks and
valleys that such a wall would have from one rock to the next. This means
that the still image might work out, but as a player walks up to and past
the wall, there is never any of the visual clues that there are actually rocks
coming out of that mortar.
Because the color maps are complete, and because the raw versions of those
color textures are carefully saved in the images folder of the Maya project file
(Incursion-Maya), the core building blocks of this technique are at hand. A bit
of time in Photoshop and a few additional tools will yield some reasonable
normal maps.
The drawback to using Photoshop to develop normal maps is that the
creation is a little more opaque.
Figure 7.1
shows what a bump map would
look like as opposed to a normal map.
Figure 7.1
Bump (top) vs normal (bottom).
