Fall break is over and after a week of relaxing I came back ready to rock this project. Because I managed to get all of my normal mapping done prior to the break, I was actually a week ahead of my previous schedule. As great as a taking another week off sounds, however, I learned a long time ago never to waste an opportunity to get ahead and stay ahead so I decided to spend the week on several things that I had been putting off instead. Due to various time constraints and tasks that were simply more important, I had put off looking into normal baking. While there where a few things I knew I would have to bake normals for, I wanted to see if baking down high poly smoothed meshes to my low poly geometry was something that would help my project aesthetically or not.
During my research I found that this was not something that everyone included in their workflow, so it wasn't entirely clear to me as to whether it was something I would absolutely need to do or not.
My first problem was that it was a process I knew about, but not one I had ever actually done so it meant I would being doing it for the first time. I watched several videos about transfer maps in maya, but because it is one of those processes that doesn't have a perfect answer (meaning the settings will change almost every time), I took me a long time to get it to work right. At first the transfer maps wouldn't even work. Then they would only pick up half the details. It got to the point where I had wasted about half the week trying to get it to work, and I was about ready to just give up, when I suddenly realized my problem. I was following all these tutorials online, but in all of them the user had their grid at the default Maya size. It occurred to me that because my scene is set up to UDK proportions, and therefore 16x larger than the default, and because I was transferring in world space, that i would need to adjust my max search distance to fit the size of the scene. I still didn't entirely understand the transfer map process, but after asking multiple people for help and still not having any solutions, I decided one last try wouldn't hurt. So I set my max search depth to 16% and crossed my fingers while I waited for the normals to bake. I opened the file, and finally found that it was successful.
Now for my second challenge, deciding if baking down the normals would be possible considering how much time I had left to get my project done. I had to consider how much time it took to set up each piece, bake down the normals, clean up any minor issues, and set them all up in my scene. I spent several hours setting up and baking out different pieces of my scene to get an idea how long it would take. Overall I was spending 1-3 hours on each object depending on it's complexity. With 162 objects in total, it was taking far too long. Had it gone like UVs where I was completing about 5 objects per hour it would've been more do-able, but my unfamiliarity with the process was making me slow, too slow.
Although it already seemed like I was not going to be attempting to bake out each object, I wanted to bring one of the objects into UDK and compare it's appearance to objects without their normals baked. I decided, that if it really made a difference aesthetically, than taking the time to do it could still be worthwhile.
The biggest thing baking high poly to low poly was going to do for me was effect the appearance of transitions between edges/surfaces. The objects that I had baked the high poly to the low poly had much softer and sometimes hardly even noticeable edge transitions. While this was not a back thing for smaller objects, I found that it didn't work well with most of the large objects in my scene and I actually preferred the much harder and sharper look of the non-baked objects. In the end I decided, that baking down the normals via transfer maps in maya was not going to be a worthwhile use of my time.
There were however, several smaller objects in my scene where I would need to bake down geometry. Several of the windows in my scene had details that I felt that could be baked down and done mostly through textures.
There were also several small objects that I just never got around to making last quarter that I wanted to make sure got done before I began texturing. The buildings are supposed to be worn down and even boarded up in some cases, so I wanted to several variations of scrap metal/scrap wood coverings to be placed on some of the windows.
Time Tracking:
1h 00m : Timeline and Planning
0h 33m : Background Building thumbs
2h 27m : Normal Baking
1h 55m : Normal Baking Workflow
3h 00m : Normal Baking
2h 00m : Modeling
0h 30m : Planning Organization
1h 36m : Modeling
2h 02m : Modeling/Normal Baking
2h 44m : Modeling
2h 15m : Modeling
21h 02m Total
