Making of Varga

“Making of Varga ” by Paul Tosca make a couple of directional lights and position them to light from above around the object
use the same batch bake mental ray options but it will compute super fast now ( its tracing only the specular pass) ( this time double the resolution when baking and you will donwsample it in photoshop to use on top of textures … you will achieve better results this way ) you should end up with a texture like below and you can overlay it on your diffuse textures with screen/color dodge blending modes ( to give more variations ) … it works great for plastic, metal, leather or other materials that have high specularity ( it wont look so good for cloth for example )
Enough said about baking … bare with me for the last paragraph ( i kept the cool tips for the end 🙂 ) 4.4. Further tweaking of normal maps in photoshopThis paragraph is for those of you who want to better understand normal maps and it may seem a little technical (it requires some basic knowledge of math , vectors and stuff like that ). 4.4.1.Some general info about TS (tangent space) normal maps First, i would like to talk a little about normal maps , how they are computed/displayed. I am more interested in tangent space normal maps ( world or object space normal maps are not suitable for characters or for objects that will deform ) so for now on when i will say normal map you will assume i am talking about tangent space unless stated otherwise. If you are in the same situation i was when i first started with normal maps ( tangent space in particular ) probably the following info will help. At the beginning i was really frustrated by the “Seam” problem 🙂 : a normal map computed within a software will not display properly in another one , and i am talking here about the seam that will appear in the geometry where you will have an uv shell border.I have struggled to find out what the problem was … thought i am doing something wrong , read the help of each apps then started searching on the internet and after some research i finally got the idea about the problem , how and why it will occur …but not how to fix it though:) The main problem resides in the way each application computes/displays tangent space normal maps. Tangent space is represented by three vectors: normal ( that will always be perpendicular to the surface ) ,and two other vectors perpendicular to the normal called tangent and bi-normal ( or bi-tangent : i have seen that the names are used interchangeably though some say that the correct name will be bitangent since we are talking about a surface … for a curve in 3D , the tangent space we will have one tangent and two normals , normal and binormal …. for surfaces we will have one normal and two tangent vectors : tangent and bitangent but the naming does not matter much as long as we know what vectors we are talking about). These three vectors can be defined for each point on a surface and taken all together they define a coordinate frame. Usually tangent space per triangle will be computed in the following way: -the normal vector will always be perpendicular to the surface (triangle) (it will be the blue one and it will be stored in the blue channel of the normal map) -the tangent(the red one stored in red channel) and binormal(the green one stored in green channel) vectors will be oriented in accordance with the UVs :tangent will be left to right(or right to left) in UV space (so it will be U coordinate in texture space ) and binormal will be down to up (or up-down) (so it will be the V coord in texture space) ;probably you have seen in many dialogs for normal maps the options to flip Red or Green channel , these options stand for the orientations of the tangent(left-right/right-left) and binormal (up-down/down-up) .. some apps use different orientation than others; you can flip the channels inside photoshop, for instance to flip the Red channel you will press Ctrl+1 ( to go to the red channel ) and Ctrl+I (to invert it) then Ctrl+~ (control tilda , that will be left to 1 key -) to go back to full RGB image (same for green Ctrl+2,Ctrl+I,Ctrl+~).
     

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