November 02, 2018
For the second part of the alien making we transferred over to Maya and used quad draw to make a UV. By transferring the alien over to Maya after making sure when exporting it was at it lowest poly form we could then make it go live and use the quad draw tool to draw squares. These squares would make up the low poly UV, the only issue with this was that we couldn't have any triangles or shapes with more than four sides.
Once we had finished the UV mapping we ended up with a low poly version of our model. The full head next to the quad draw version is actually the final baked head I forgot I deleted the imported one after I went back to screen shot the steps.
Then the next task was moving onto baking the low and high poly models, this basically give it the textures of the high poly but without the high poly count it has, so it can stay low poly but still have the details. I named each model high and low so I wouldn't get confused.
I then had to go to the rendering section in Maya and click on the lighting/shading tab to bring up the transfer maps section. Using this menu I can choose how to bake the models and at what quality.
In the add selected tab you drag in the high and low poly and set the output maps to normal. Then I set what quality I wanted and big I wanted it to be.
Once the settings where finished I baked the model, this then gives you a duplicate of the model but with the UV you have drawn and all the details of the high poly one.
After many computer crashes (thank you college computers) I then added the normal map I made to the low poly head as a texture and it made this. As you can see its much smoother than if you were to import a high poly model.
Although this was a massive struggle I am happy with how this turned out and it was nice to do something different than normal objects. Next time I don't think I would do anything different, nothing went wrong with my head. The design had no impact on the process of the baking, overall I am pleased.
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