On the first part we finished some quick bakes to start the texture
In the end of this series we are going from the clean LowPoly to the textured one

• Autodesk Maya
  
• any program where you created your highpoly model, in this case we are going to use Zbrush
  
• Your HighPoly model
  
• Your LowPoly model with UV Layout ready

That means you will need your model with all the faces setup on a 2d layout and ready to be textured.
Normally I prefer to work on a not straightforward workflow, but the UV layout is something that you cannot let to make it later and is necessary to be done before going to the texture stage.

More information about the UV Layout can be found on the Part 1


On this tutorial we are going to use a model I made for Dota on the first months of 2014 called Spirit of Anger

Here are both the HighPoly and the LowPoly with the final texture

The Light bake is an extremely important stage to help showing the volumes on the model.

We are going to add it on the texture we finished on the part 1.

The lowpoly model and textures can be downloaded on the Part 1

This tutorial will cover the light bake on Maya using a model from Zbrush, but it doesn't need to be only on Zbrush, any other source will work.

First you will need to export your model to Maya. If you work with a lot of subtools like me you can export all of them separated or merge everything and export once. I personally prefer to merge everything but it is up to you.


Maya is an amazing program, but it can' t hold the same amount of polygons as Zbrush, so be careful with the amount of subdivisions you use on your model.

Instead of importing the highpoly model, it is better to use it as a reference*. So you dont increase your maya file size and will be easier to handle in case you need to update the file.

* To import a reference in Maya, go to File > Reference Editor.

Also, if your maya starts to crash because of the amount of polygons and you get stuck on a loop where you cannot open the file anymore, just change your original Highpoly file name and you will be able to open your maya file again.



If you reach this amount of polygons that it becomes a flat color instead of lines, you are probably about to crash it. The save and the incremental save are your friends.

If you managed to get your highpoly on maya, put it on a layer and hide that layer. (then save again)

If you are having problems in importing your mesh, you can isolate your lowpoly before referencing the highpoly, the you hide it inside a layer before de-isolating the low. That way maya will never need to render it on the viewport, reducing the chances of crashing the program.

Now that you have your models in place is time to create the light(s)

I usually work with just one and if I want more light positions I animate the light's translation and bake one map for each frame.

The light position is really important. We need to attract attention on the character to the most important parts, and the values of the texture helps on that.

Position your light on the top and and a little to the front like on the example. It doesn't need to be like that all the time, but this way usually works.



Now you need to set the material of your HighPoly.
A good one is the default Blinn but you can go with other ones if you want.

Later you can tweak the material paramenters to achieve the desired result.

1. go to the rendering tab (or press f6 on maya)
   
2. Lighting/Shading
   
3. Transfer maps
   [o/list]
   
   Now on the Transfer Maps windows on Target Meshes you add your lowpoly.
   Dont worry with the search envelope for now
   
   On Source Meshes select your HighPoly.
   If you have more then one mesh just add all of them
   
   Output Maps select Shaded
   now an important step, when chosing the Lit and shader color map dont forget to add the extension of the file. If you just add the name but not .png or .jpg maya will crash
   
   I normally use PNG or TGA
   
   On Maya common output you need to define the size of the texture, If my final texture is going to be 512 x 512 I work with 2048 x 2048 px
   
   I normally work with a bigger texture size so I can use later on the promo image and promo videos.
   
   Another important part is the Fill texture seams
   Right now is on 15 but you can play with this number till you find one that you like. This number will be the amount of expansion Maya will do on your textures. That will help avoid seams when the engine change the level of details of your texture and reduce the resolution.
   
   Hit bake!
   
   If everything went well, you will see a progress bar at the bottom left corner of Maya, this process may take couple minutes. Be patient and don't touch Maya, remember that we are using a high resolution mesh inside it.

after some changes on the material and light position this is the result


Now we are going to compose over our texture from the Part 1



Following the same way we did the Bent normals

I added an flat gray ( 128 128 128 ) layer set up as Screen layer blending over the map, and set the Lightbake group as a softlight

After I tone down the opacity of the gray layer to about 80%

Now we have 2 light layers (Light Bake and the Bent normals) I decided to reduce the influence of the Bent normals group and set the opacity to 50%

that is the final result:



As you may notice, the volumes now are more visible and it looks more real.


Just to show how useful that can be, I am adding this color pass under all the layers




Almost no 2d skill needed

One or two more tutorials and we can finish the texture

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