Maya normal maps

Here is a screen shot from maya.
The low res mesh is only 170 faces and the high res sculpt is several hundred thousand. The render in the lower right corner is of the mesh on the left. One can see the UV map and normal map used to render the detail from the sculpt.

I used Topogun ( http://www.topogun.com/) to retopologize a zbrush model and then generated the normal map in Maya. I find Maya's normal map generation to be slightly easier to use than Max although I prefer Zbrush's zmapper overall. It is nice to be able to create normal maps in Maya easily however.

If one does not have access to Max or Maya or Zbrush to make normal maps, Xnormal is a great option as well.
http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

Compositing

So I am still trying to get better at compositing. Nice thing about teaching is that I can try out techniques as in class demos.

The assignment was to take the zbrush character the students had been working on and render it as a statue into a background plate with HDR lighting. They made their own custom probes and background plates. Here are two renders from the demo. The model is by Joseph Huggins.

Diceroll

Lucky ?

Here is a still from a credits sequence I am working on. Maya 08 + Mray.

3d dice against a photo background. What I can't understand is why one would want or need 3d dice for their credit sequence (?) Maybe some impossible camera moves? FX? It is a mystery . . .

3d progress on Android Masquerade

These were created in Maya and these latest renders were examples of "in-line compositing" . . . meaning I rendered and composited the images within Maya's renderlayers options. The metal pic is me playing around with the chrome spec material over-ride. The glowing eyes were me playing around with having an additional render layer which was screened on top of the already multiplied occlusion. These took between 2-3 minutes to render on my Dual P4 Xeon.