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Creating a Low Poly Game Asset in Blender – Addendum

by Jonathan Williamson
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Modeling, Texturing and UV Unwrapping Difficulty:

It’s time to fix some Blender normal maps!

It recently came to our attention that some serious mistakes were made during the normal mapping portion of our Low Poly Game Asset Creation series. These errors were presented in video #6, in which we used incorrect techniques and poor methods for several of the normal map baking processes. Due to this we’ve added an addendum video that goes over each of the errors and shows how they were fixed for much higher quality, and more accurate normal maps.

You can find the addendum here on this page, or watch it on the original series page.

Please accept our apologies for misleading anyone and presenting poor techniques during that portion of the series.

For more info on Normal Maps check out this excellent wiki on Polycount.
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Discussion

28 Responses to “Creating a Low Poly Game Asset in Blender – Addendum”
  1. Posts: 24
    olson says:

    Thanks for this Jonathan it was a great series in its own right, looking forward to see these improvements and such :)

  2. Posts: 120
    greg says:

    Thanks Jonathan,
    this really rounds out the series, all this in addition to the “Mastering
    modelling” workshop, I am learning so much lately its fantastic,
    cheers!

  3. Posts: 27
    Ivan Kukucov says:

    How will you rate blender game engine vs unity and other game engines that don’t cost millions?

    • Posts: 256
      Jeff Bessette says:

      Torque was open sourced last month so you can check that out if your interested. I haven’t played with it much, but I don’t think it is as user friendly as Unity but it would be more polished than the BGE.

      http://www.garagegames.com/

      • Posts: 42
        Rocky Arbigaus says:

        NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *Darth Vader mode ON*

        We used to work with TGE. Since we switched to Unity I don`t want to look back.
        I don`t know how Torque is right now, but I must say that I don`t care anymore.

  4. Posts: 1
    Markus Kruse says:

    Im a little disapointed that this also is an citizen tutorial. My citizen account has expired since I watched this the first time. Anyway, it is a really great series and well worth the money spent, slightly incorrect or not. :-)

  5. Posts: 28
    colpolstudios says:

    Hi, I spent today re-doing the entire tutorial and posted my daz studio render.

    The Triangulate is also an important step when exporting or importing models into Daz or Poser.

    Thanks for the update.

  6. Posts: 23
    George Patterson says:

    Thanks Jonathan, this explains some issues I had in the past. FYI – I noticed that not all of the Citizen Tutorials show up when you select that option from the tutorials menu. The hippo and Greek Temple tuts for example.

    • Posts: 3072
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Hi George, thanks for the heads up! We’re working to get this fixed right now. With any luck it should be working shortly.

      Cheers,
      Jonathan

  7. Posts: 12
    ratboy says:

    :D I couldn’t be happier about this John! I’m glad to see you responded well to my friend Paul’s criticisms. I was afraid I’d wasted my money on this subscription, but you’ve absolutely made my day and restored my conviction that you are the best tutorialist on the interwebs. Thank you.

    • Posts: 3072
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Most definitely! The last thing I ever want to do is mislead anyone and so when issues like this come up I try my best to get them fixed. Thanks for speaking up!

      Let me know if there’s anything else you find yourself needing or wanting.

      Cheers,
      Jonathan

      • Posts: 12
        ratboy says:

        I never thought for a second that you were trying to be misleading. It was just frustrating mostly because Blender 2.63 wasn’t responding well to deleting the extra edge loops on the low poly model, and the normals render wouldn’t show up at all on the small nozzle, but when exported into max it worked just fine. I think now, using proper techniques, these problems will not exist regardless of the version of Blender being used (or it may just be a hardware issue on my end… I’m not sure yet). I think I will try redoing the whole project from scratch in 2.64 now that there is a stable release. Thanks again!

  8. Posts: 9
    M C says:

    Mistakes are valuable lessons. I am sure in cases such as these we can come away with some valuable troubleshooting knowledge. Thanks for the commitment to quality.

  9. Posts: 263
    Jeremy Deighan says:

    Are the changes you are discussing being made on the high poly or low poly version of the model?

    • Posts: 3072
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Both actually. You can see that I’m no longer using the punched through portions and have actually modeled the connections for the spouts. I’ve also add a lot more polys to the main rims to better define their silhouettes.

  10. Posts: 263
    Jeremy Deighan says:

    If you create a base mesh and then sculpt hi resolution to a copy of that basemesh, can you just use the base mesh as your low poly? Whats the difference in doing that and retopology?

    • Posts: 3072
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      You can do that but the requirements for a clean sculpting base and a optimized lowpoly model are quite different. A lowpoly will be all triangles and optimized to show the form, while the sculpt basemesh should be created of uniform quads to allow for clean and even sculpting.

  11. Posts: 12
    ratboy says:

    I’m assuming that your addendum to the normals also applies to the Ambient Occlusion bake? i.e. We don’t need to keep the subsurf modifier on and use a bunch of extra edge loops for the ao bake, but rather make sure we’re baking to the final low poly model, no subsurf(except on the high poly), and converted to tris. Is this correct?

    • Posts: 3072
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Yep that’s correct! Although its not as important as the AO merely contributes to the highlights as shadows, now the shading so much. But it would still be best to follow the addendum practices.

  12. Posts: 1
    braindx says:

    What would be a good tutorial to understand how to model the spout connections without punching them through?

  13. Posts: 3
    João Morais says:

    I’m getting an access denied error while trying to download the video + source files on this one (I have Citizen subscription), I’d appreciate if it could be fixed :)

  14. Posts: 25
    Kana Lunatic says:

    while time passed is there a free or cheaper alternative to “Crazy Bump”? I think 300 dollar for comercial use for such nice, but limited in use software is a bit too much u.u

    • Posts: 2
      nicola vaccarone says:

      I wonder why there is nothing like that in gpl gnu/linux world.
      I use to map the image as greyscale on a subdivided square mesh so I can have a displacement on it.
      Render and save as normal map.
      basically is what crazybump does.
      I’mgoing to create a script in near future…

  15. Posts: 2
    nicola vaccarone says:

    AccessDeniedAccess Denied13E96AB962F6C000mGRFmo3v+gWbvi+OnKTVpOWpr7QNpGzafZZm98hbnluXEBM8rTQwe8GX7/+Kf2OI

    here is the error on download button .!

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