Perfectly normal maps

Click above, I broke my embed codes.

This about one second's spotlight for my leading actress Will came to be as a part of my slowly regenerating trust for my PC's current updated state of not constantly crashing and actually being able to run 3Ds max properly. I began studying Zbrush and learned how to bake normal maps out from it, something I'd wanted to learn for some time now. After all, the games nowdays are pretty dependent on normal mapping and it feels like one of those things that every modeler should be able to handle.


So Willow here is my little learning dummy, she suffers from many flaws since I haven't built her that properly from the start, more like applied all newfound knowledges on her as time has passed, so she isn't finished by all means; the skinning needs work (the sleeves for example), her shirt -arms mostly - is probably going to get new geometry altogether (once again), she has yet no facial rigging at all, only that constant ":[|"-look on her face, and so forth. The actual NM's show best for some few frames as the light hits her jeans.


Anyways, as I baked her those maps, I thought that what the hell, might as well see if I remember anything from those After Effects -classes too. So I changed the moving light that was originally there just to show the NM in different lighting into that little glowing whatever, built a scene for her over this old low-res forest painting I'd made ages ago and tried to put her in there at least somewhat decently. Lots of different layers of noise, color correction and blur occured.


Spent only one late night for this scene and didn't bother with too much detail, but this proved to be really useful for me as I went through the phases needed for getting stuff into proper polygons and out of 3Dmax into a moving picture.