I have decided that it would be best (and most stylish) to make my game using normal maps. Now I don’t mean everything has to be made of the things, but I want my main character especially to detailed and smooth and still allow the engine to run like butter, if you will.
I think I know the basics: Two meshes, one low-res, one massively subsurfed, and then…
what? Render baking Normalmap to UV?
And then what? Using the normalmap plugin for GIMP? And then how to apply this to GE? Would the mesh work with animation? How would I get a full 3D mesh rather than a texture?
If anyone knows the answer to this, or even better has an example for me, then I will probably remember the favour. Thanks!
In the recently published Blender Roadmap, it says we may have the ability to bake high-res meshes onto low-res ones in Blender 2.44 (which I assume will use normal maps). Granted, Blender 2.44 is probably quite a while away from being released, but at least it’s coming; and then we won’t have to look for other programs to do this (not that the other programs are bad, it’s just a little more convenient sometimes to have everything you need in Blender, I think).
Not so . . . first paragraph on the page you linked to says that development time for 2.44 is March-April. We can probably expect to have this functionality sometime in May.
I’m not sure what’s so special about the upcoming release, but you can do something like this already. Subsurf your mesh, and bake the texture from the subsurfed version of the mesh. Presto!
What’s ‘special’ is that the next release will include the functionality of creating Normal maps in Blender, whereas now we can only use Normal maps created in other programs.
The texture baking you refer to only includes lighting and color information in the maps generated.
