Formatting the Dragon ready for the Animatic

Hi guys so over the last few weeks I have been working on finishing the Dragon. After I had completed it I needed to bring the model over into 3DS Max and format it ready for the animatic.

For the dragon animation in the animatic, I needed to have the basic low poly original model look like the high poly detailed model but still have a good typology so that its easy to animate. This meant only one thing. I needed to bake the normal map of the high poly detailing onto the low poly model and then texture it by applying the high poly's UVW texture map onto the low poly model.

All very confusing yes but it was actually quite straight forward. Reminding myself on how to project normal maps with a few tutorials on YouTube I was able to produce the image shown below, the basic dragon looking like the detailed dragon.

All I had to do after that was apply the texture with the defuse option on the material editor as well as the normal map projection. This produced the final model that I would be able to use in my finished animatic.

s

asa

The first image shows what the model looked like before rendering it, a multi-colour, oil spill type texture on the basic, low poly model; and the second image on the right shows what the dragon looks like when rendered. This image is just a reference one and not taken with lighting accentuating details.