Joker Post Mortem pt. 2

I figure I would get the rest of my character texturing trials and tribulations out of the way so I can move onto new things and have a legitimate excuse to say Lando Calrissian. But that's for a different day. At this juncture, it's time not be serious and get my discussion pants on.



Last time I gesticulated about this project, it was about the challenges of pattern making for textures, and now I'm going to move onto something considerably more fun. Normal mapping. Now, I will be honest, learning how to normal map with no prior instruction whatsoever was challenging to say the least, but I feel that the results speak for themselves, shown by our Clown Prince of Crime's lovely face here:



Before the obvious is stated, the lips looking, funky, as it were, is due to inherent problems with the geometry, so we'll gloss over that bit. Now, after I approached the situation from several angles in terms of generating the normal maps, the best solution for me turned out to be making my high-poly mesh inside Mudbox, eporting it, and then importing both the high and low-poly meshes into xNormal and generating the normal maps in there. However, I ended up having to modify the maps inside Photoshop in order to make the maps smoother and to fix some issues with how Maya handles normal maps in general.