An Introduction and Understanding of Normal Maps with Modo
Low level knowledge about what's going on under the hood with normal mapping
Watch Promo
In Intro to Normal Maps, Warren Marshall will be providing a crash course on normal maps and walking you through the technical know-how to fix commonly encountered errors in your normal maps. Knowing what's going on under the hood will make you a better artist because you'll not just be able to fix errors, but you'll understand why those errors are happening, which is a much stronger position to be in. During this course he'll start at the fundamentals and work our way up to advanced trouble shooting techniques. This will include covering topics such as: What a Normal Is, What a Normal Map Is, What Normal Maps Do and Don't Do, What Causes Seams, and various baking related topics to name a few. We won't cover specific applications or workflows because the idea here is to give you the core knowledge of what a normal map is - specifically, what it's doing for you and what it's not doing for you. Near the end, he'll talk about how to avoid projection error when baking your normal maps and he'll be showing you an easy way to add details to your high poly mesh in the form of floaters. Lots of great introductory content here, so don't miss out!
Your Instructor
I'm an environment/hard surface artist-for-hire living in Wilmington, NC! I worked at Epic Games for over 15 years working on titles like Unreal Tournament, Gears of War and Fortnite. After that, I went into freelancing. Since then I've done prop and environment work for some fun projects including We Happy Few from Compulsion Games, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. I've also done a bunch of asset packs for the various marketplaces. I have experience with Unreal Engine 4/5 and Unity and know how to put assets together quickly that look good in those engines. Do you need an experienced artist to work on your project? Find me on social media or shoot me an email!
Course Curriculum
-
Preview1287-01-Intro (1:20)
-
Start1287-02-WhatANormalIs (4:15)
-
Start1287-03-WhatANormalMapIs (7:47)
-
Start1287-04-WhatItDoesAndDoesNotDo (4:42)
-
Start1287-05-UVUnwrapping (6:43)
-
Preview1287-06-WhatCausesSeams (7:19)
-
Start1287-07-CageBakingVsDistanceBaking (6:31)
-
Start1287-08-Triangulation (5:17)
-
Start1287-09-ProjectionErrors (7:32)
-
Start1287-10-Floaters (5:46)
-
Start1287-11-Outro (0:48)