I’ve been working on getting a low poly version of Serenity (the ship from the Firefly show, if you don’t recognize the name) ready to mod into a game, and earlier today I pretty much finished the modelling portion and am starting on texturing.
The state of things, as they are right now. Currently at 5493 triangles, 3274 vertices:
The high poly version has 239,895 faces, most of which are quads!
I have a high-res version of the same model (not my work, I found it at fireflyfans.net) that I’m looking to use to generate nor maps and, hopefully, help with textures. It looks like this:
There’s a huge difference in detail, as you can see.
I understand how to create nor maps. What I don’t understand is a good system to use the high poly model to generate textures that I can easily map to my unwrapped low poly model. Are there any good proceedures for this sort of work, or is it going to end up a hopelessly manual task?
Is there some way to “render to uv map” that I could in theory load onto the new model, which would have a similar unwrap that would automagically work?
Regarding nor map generation, the ones I’ve created in testing have come out with a moire pattern on them:
http://tru7h.org/files/images/firefly/x3/lowpoly-5.jpg
Is this an artifact of rendering to a flat plane, or something else? The nor map was rendered at 1024x1024 with 16 OSA.
Last but not least, here’s a couple wireframes of my model if anyone has any feedback to offer: