Technical Paper

Ralph Texturing Process By Adam Webb

This Technical Paper will outline the process of creating a Colour, Ambient and a Normal map to enhance the texturing process on a games model.

Stage One Colour Map

Open up Photoshop with the Out UV of your model (in this example Ralph) and make a copy and select (Screen) in layer type so you can see one through the other as shown below.

Out UV

Example of Screening Layers

Then create a new layer in between and use the paintbrush tool or create a texture tile to use or clone off from. Once complete it should look something like the example image of a finished texture map.

Ralphs Colour Map

Delete the alpha channel and screen layer and then flatten into one and save as a Tiff file, Open up in Maya with your model and select the geometry by right click and new material then click the box next to colour and add your texture map in the file section and make quadratic is off. Select the appropriate material type, in Ralphs case a Matte.

Flatten Image Option

Colour Option to apply Map

Then add a few lights into the scene, two directional and then any other lights needed as shown in example, then go to render settings and choose Mental Ray and Production and produce a render.

Light Setup example

Ralph Colour Render

Step Two Ambient Map

The next step is to work on the Ambient Map, Hyper shade will need to open and then select Surface Shader and Mib - Amb- Occlusion, the Occlusion settings should read 250 in samples, 8 in Spread, and 4 or 5 in distance and then right click model and apply in new materials Lambert.

Surface Shader and Mib Amb Occlussion Settings and Links

Then switch off the lights and chose render in the top settings and Lights/Shading, Batch Bake (box by the side) and enter the following settings: Tick Bake to Objects, select Multi Object, tick Bake Shadows and use bake set override, change colour encode to Occlusion and occlusion range to 256. Save it out as a preferred file name, then convert and close, this will take several minutes once done the model texture will change.

Mental Ray Baking

Go back to Photoshop and find the ambient map in the project file, RenderData, Mental Ray, Light map and open the colour map and put the Ambient map in the above layer and select multiply in the layer. Then reduce the occupancy down to around 30%. Flatten this and save this as a Tiff. (Go into Maya and click model, replace colour map with the ambient map and take a new render .

Occlusion Map

Ambient Map combined with colour

Ralph Ambient Render

Step Three Normal Map

The Final stage is to add a normal map and before you begin this step Nvidia needs to be downloaded from a site such as the one below, to be included in Photoshop .

Example website of where to download Nvidia

Open the colour map and select it and then find Nvidia tools which will open the generator settings, set the normal value from 1 5 and use the preview option to decide which will be best and convert to get the normal map.

Nvidia Normal Map Filter

Normal Map

Go back into Maya and into Attribute Editor and texture map, select Bump and apply the normal map and in the option Use As select Tangent Space Normals. Make sure all lights are back on and go into Render settings and change Gauss to Mitchell in Quality filter and take a final render.

Applying Normal Map

Ralph Normals Render