Pipeline 1: Jetpack Jones - Baking the Normal Maps

  For the knee pads, a normal plane was created and placed over the knee joint on the trousers. This plane was then sectioned using some edge loops, altered to fit the design of the knee and then extruded back into the trousers. The creases was bevelled to add a bit more detail to the knee pads. Once happy with the pad, it was duplicated, grouped and then placed in the scale -1 to create one pad on each knee. 

Modelled Knee Pads

As with the torso, the pads/trousers was combined and then smoothed with the previous settings. The low res trousers was also smoothed. 

The normal maps was then made via the "Transfer Map" options, placing the low res into the target and the high res into the source. In the Low_res options, we need the display to be both and the search envelope to be just big enough to fit everything in the radius. 

Search Envelope

In the output map, we needed to bake the normal maps with the following select options:

- File option to be Tiff. 

- Map space as tangent space.

-  Connect maps as a new shader. 

-  Map width/depth of 4096.

- Sampling quality of high.

After the map was baked, they was transferred into photoshop and anything that not needed removed (painted the same colour blue as the background). These was then placed into the source images folder.

Torso Normal Map

Trousers Normal Map

When going back into Maya, the normal maps now works in the viewport in the material options. The normal maps created in maya have the colour management turned off so to work correctly in the viewport. However, when first doing these maps, I seemed to have a little problem with seams appearing.

Seams Appearing

After discussing the problem with my tutor, the uv's was causing a bit of a problem. After relaying laying them out and sorting out the seams, they now  work . 

Going back to the rigged versions, the applied Lambert on the torso/legs was changed to a Blinn (in the attributes) and the specular was reduced down. In the OpenSubDiv menu, the uv bounding needed to have "Preserve Edges and Corners" on otherwise more seems can appear.

Working Torso Normal Maps

Working Trousers Normals Map