castaneda opened this issue on Oct 21, 2012 · 21 posts
ShawnDriscoll posted Tue, 23 October 2012 at 11:19 PM
Baker is a plugin for old Carrara. I don't have a new version of Carrara, so I don't know if it does normal maps very well on its own or if it still needs the plugin. Maya and Blender and modo already work with imported (tangential) normal maps.
What I mean by flat plane is, your object is just a flat 4-sided polygon (or with a diagonal line through it, so it's two triangles together to make a square plane). That plane is then UV mapped in 3D-Coat and, say, you decide to paint rivets on it so it has a metal plating feel to it like a wall or floor might have. Then you export the plane as an OBJ into your rendering program and apply the normal map you painted to it for the bump/normal channel. In both 3D-Coat and your modeling/rendering program, the wall model is a that plane object. You then copy/paste that wall next to itself to extend the length of the wall.
Last night I uninstalled Vue 10 Infinite and put Vue 9.5 Infinite back on. It doesn't like tangential normal maps either from 3D-Coat.
At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfjB-ekFWHk I have a video showing how to paint rivets and render them with normal maps. Very exciting.