Using Maya: Making Normal and Texture Maps

Creating Normal and Texture Maps.

With my finished UV's, I needed to desaturated them in order to create a normal map. The reason for this is when create a normal, it uses black and white as different ranges of depth, in order to make it appear more 3D. I saved the desaturated file as a 'Targa'.

 I then opened a clever piece of software called 'Crazy bump' which generates UVs into normal maps for you. On this occasion I used the create 'heightmap' tab to transfer my grey scale image into a normal map.

I selected my Targa file and uploaded the UV.

Once Crazy bump had generated the UV texture, it automatically loaded up my normal map and a 3D example of what it would look like within Maya.

As you can see the texture from my Photoshop work really comes out in this example. The wood grain looks good, but I think would look better if I tweaked some settings.

 I changed the intensity to full to really get a strong definition from all the textures.

 I then clicked 'save' and saved the normals to a file to reopen in Maya.

I went back to my door model and reassigned a Lambert material. I then selected the material attributes to place my Normals map to a bump map file. This would make my door have the properties of a 3D texture, with the use of shadows and highlights.

In the settings I selected bump mapping and selected to open 'file'

In this new window for bump mapping, I changed the 'use as' drop down menu from bump to 'Tangent Space normals'

From there I opened my Normal map file I created in Crazy bump.

Here is my door with my normal map applied!

Although my door has a Lambert set material, I wanted to change it on my two bell models. I decided to change it to a 'Blinn' because it makes the shapes appear shiny, which would be ideal for these metallic bells. I applied the material in the same way I did the Lambert by holding down the right mouse button and assigning it.

I then repeated the process I did on my door, but with the bells. I had to re-upload my normal map as I had already applied a new material.

Here is my bell with a Normal map and a Blinn material. Looks much better and shinier!

Now to add my textures! I selected the door and went back into the 'materials attributes tab'

However, this time instead of clicking 'bump mapping' I selected 'colour' instead. I opened the settings tab next to it to open up a textures menu. I clicked file and selected my coloured textures targa file that I did on Photoshop.

Here is my door with my normals and my texture applied!

I had to also reapply the texture file to my bells because of the separate 'Blinn' material. Once I added the texture/colour, it really made the bells appear shiny and bright.

Here is the final composition of my door! with both normal and texture maps applied!