MicroWave

[sammael]

Is anyone using MicroWave from evasion 3d & if so is it as good as it looks? im considering buying it but the price is very high.

[kfinla]

I'd advise against it.. its a dead tool.. I dont think evasion has making been making lightwave plugs for a year or more.. I found a lot of stuff broken and and not functioning as described... technicalities etc hidden in the manual u get after purchase.. I wanted my money back after a day and ended up just having to eat the cost with endless emails with safe harbor and evasion till i was out of email typing energy.

[jin choung]

also, most of the functionality can be found in free apps all over the place now... basically, you're baking a hi res model's details into a low res mesh by way of NORMAL MAP....

do a search for bake normal map and normal map at flay.com to find a whole crap load of stuff.

MW is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overpriced and only got away with it at the time cuz they were there early.

jin

[sammael]

also, most of the functionality can be found in free apps all over the place now... basically, you're baking a hi res model's details into a low res mesh by way of NORMAL MAP....

do a search for bake normal map and normal map at flay.com to find a whole crap load of stuff.

MW is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay overpriced and only got away with it at the time cuz they were there early.

jin

Alctually baking a normal map is not the attraction, its baking all the surfaces from a highpolly object to a lowpolly one that attracts me, are there any other tools that do that?

[jin choung]

ummm... that's what i said! and yes, there are. many. ATI has a free tool and there are others floating around....

haven't had a need for it recently so you'll have to do the research yourself.

jin

[jin choung]

oh, clarification:

you are baking the hires detail to the lowres model BY WAY OF NORMAL MAP.

how else do you think that's happening... when they say bake, that's what they're talking about....

oh, or it could be to a DISPLACEMENT MAP too.... same principle and usually, the same app will do both. one to a color normal map and another to a gray scale map.

make sure that if you want to do a displacement, that it generates a 16 bit per channel, hdr image map like a tiff or .hdr or something.

jin

[sammael]

oh, clarification:

you are baking the hires detail to the lowres model BY WAY OF NORMAL MAP.

how else do you think that's happening... when they say bake, that's what they're talking about....

oh, or it could be to a DISPLACEMENT MAP too.... same principle and usually, the same app will do both. one to a color normal map and another to a gray scale map.

make sure that if you want to do a displacement, that it generates a 16 bit per channel, hdr image map like a tiff or .hdr or something.

jin

I dont want to bake the normal map, I want to cast the colour map, specmap, gloss map etc onto a lowres model with diferent uv coords.

I want to create a textured high detail object and bake ALL of the diferent textures to lowres geometry.

[sammael]

I have the ati normal mapper, I have zbrush, I have the plugin for modeler that bakes normals. I am familiar with baking normal maps.

[jin choung]

oooooh.... that always seemed to be the least impressive part of MW so i just dismissed it from my mind.

yah, i've seen apps around that will bake at least the color map. not sure if i've seen one that will transfer the other stuff though... although you can just assign it to the color channel and manually bake it out.

anyhoo, free tools do exist for it so my suggestion is look around first.

jin

[duke]

Uh, you know you can do all this in 9 right? I'm really amazed this post is even here!

[dpont]

Have added a win32 Surface Cast node for baking various
channel with the Surface Baking Camera:
http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/SurfaceCast.zip

(this is a beta not fully tested)

There's also the Normal Cast node for baking normal (win32 & 64):
http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/NormalCast.html

Denis.

[sammael]

Uh, you know you can do all this in 9 right? I'm really amazed this post is even here!
I amazed you bothered to post without any further explanation, how is this possible in 9?
I dont want to bake the textures onto the object that they are assigned to but to a completely diferent object with diferent UV texture coords.
Do you care to elaborate on how this is possible instead of just suggesting that its so incredibly easy that its not worth bothering to explain?

[sammael]

Have added a win32 Surface Cast node for baking various
channel with the Surface Baking Camera:
http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/SurfaceCast.zip

(this is a beta not fully tested)

There's also the Normal Cast node for baking normal (win32 & 64):
http://perso.orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/NormalCast.html

Denis.

Awesome, thank you Ill test this out right now!

[duke]

I amazed you bothered to post without any further explanation, how is this possible in 9?
I dont want to bake the textures onto the object that they are assigned to but to a completely diferent object with diferent UV texture coords.
Do you care to elaborate on how this is possible instead of just suggesting that its so incredibly easy that its not worth bothering to explain?

We live in the same city come over and i'll give you a pro-workshop lesson tutorial. But seriously, choose baking camera and just untick the mesh in scene editor so the mesh you're baking from doesn't actually render - only what is above/beneath it (above according to the distance you set in the baking camera options) and give it a border of 8 pixels. You can then use the PSD export to poop out all your channels.

[Yamba]

Bloody Victorians!

Yamba:tongue:

[duke]

Oh go back to your desert. What do you have goanna's running treadmills to keep the power going?

[sammael]

We live in the same city come over and i'll give you a pro-workshop lesson tutorial. But seriously, choose baking camera and just untick the mesh in scene editor so the mesh you're baking from doesn't actually render - only what is above/beneath it (above according to the distance you set in the baking camera options) and give it a border of 8 pixels. You can then use the PSD export to poop out all your channels.

Thanks, it works! although I did have to do a few more steps than that... anyway great this saves spending bucketloads of money on an obsolete & unsupported plugin.
Gee LW is getting good these days :)

[duke]

9.2 is blazingly fast too, i've been doing 4096x4096 bakes in 10 minutes on a far less than top of the line machine where in 9.0 it was taking atleast an hour.

[sammael]

Yeah 9.2 is sweet, I can now render scenes which I had to stop working on because they were getting too detailed. Some of my stuff renders in 2 mins when it used to take 10 - 15 mis per frame, unbelievable.
This realy makes it easy to make realy nice game models, how very exciting :)

[duke]

Another thing to note is that in smoothed normal mode (in bake camera panel) which you need to use for most bakes, it doesn't use your actual smoothing angle which is dumb. What you have to do on your low res model therefore, is to set its smoothing angle to 180, then cut/paste pieces to get your hard edges.

[chunderburger]

oh man,really?

[Dodgy]

What exactly do you mean duke, I can get hard edges in my render. Smoothed normal is for the position of the camera relative to the surface, not the actual shading of the object.

[duke]

Hopefully this explains what is hard to do so in words!

http://www.dukecg.net/bakeThing.jpg

[Dodgy]

Ah, I sit corrected :) Is this reported

[dpont]

May be a job for parallax mapping (or relief mapping),
by adding a depth map to a tangent normal map.

Denis.

[sammael]

Hey Denis, I have just been sussing out your normal mapping node, realy awesome man cheers!

[Dodgy]

Yeah, that is a very cool node :)

[chunderburger]

isnt it that you want polygon normal instead of smoothed polygon normal in th SB cam options? or does that not gived desired results?

[duke]

isnt it that you want polygon normal instead of smoothed polygon normal in th SB cam options? or does that not gived desired results?

No that one is like smoothing is off or you've done an unweld on everything. It doesn't matter that much wether you use that or smoothed if you're just baking that exact object and not whats around it seeing as the projection distance is tiny.