Bake normals from highpoly to lowpoly
- Thread starter Halestorm
- Start date
There's nothing stopping you from baking a material from a subdived model down to a base mesh (or even a less subdived mesh) since the UVs will be the same. Baking normal maps is an issue (C3D doesn't do them). You may need to lobby Martin for that 
The thing C3D will not do is bake one mesh onto another similar mesh (where the similar mesh has no topological relationship to the source mesh). This is something a lot of game artists do (e.g. they might take build a high-detail mesh and then sculpt it in zBrush and bake it onto a low-poly mesh built separately). I'm guessing what the baking process involves is projecting the render onto the destination mesh. Don't hold your breath for C3D to do this.
The thing C3D will not do is bake one mesh onto another similar mesh (where the similar mesh has no topological relationship to the source mesh). This is something a lot of game artists do (e.g. they might take build a high-detail mesh and then sculpt it in zBrush and bake it onto a low-poly mesh built separately). I'm guessing what the baking process involves is projecting the render onto the destination mesh. Don't hold your breath for C3D to do this.
Thanks for the info Podperson. I tried to do it in blender 2.56 and it baked the normals of both the low and hipoly model onto the same texture. Ill try to figure it out in the next few days so maybe that might turn out to be a decent solution. I know that 3DCoat and topogun have dedicated tools for this so I might give them a spin when I have the time.
xNormal will run under Parallels and it looks like it will run under WINE fairly well.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=11570
https://wiki.winehq.org/AppDB_Rating_Definitions
There is a Mac native program called MightyBake but the developer seems to have lost interest in it (no updates for nearly two years) although it's still on sale for $100 / $200. It's oriented towards Maya users, the website is text only kind of zany for anything cg-related) and the forum on polycount.com seemed dominated by comments like "why would I use this over xNormal"?
blender of course does all this stuff but is about a far away from "drop a mash in and it will spit out a normal map" as it gets.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=11570
https://wiki.winehq.org/AppDB_Rating_Definitions
There is a Mac native program called MightyBake but the developer seems to have lost interest in it (no updates for nearly two years) although it's still on sale for $100 / $200. It's oriented towards Maya users, the website is text only kind of zany for anything cg-related) and the forum on polycount.com seemed dominated by comments like "why would I use this over xNormal"?
blender of course does all this stuff but is about a far away from "drop a mash in and it will spit out a normal map" as it gets.