Object Space Normal Map Workflow in MODO … More Or Less

Object Space Normal Maps in MODO, xNormal, Substance Painter, Low Poly, UVs And Everything Else!

So I apparently wasn't able to stop talking once I started making this video so it covers a bunch of stuff. It's primarily focused on using MODO to bake out object space normal maps and use xNormal to convert them to tangent space.

This has several advantages - some of which I even talk about in this video! I'll need to make more of these to cover everything.

The video is a little long but you might find random pieces interesting so break it up into multiple viewings if you'd like!

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Hi! I'm Warren Marshall!

I'm a freelance, hard surface 3D artist living in North Carolina. I specialize in hard surface work but I can do pretty much anything from environments to props.

I worked at Epic Games for over 15 years and started freelancing after that. 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 and Unity and know how to put assets together quickly that look good in those engines.

Here's a link to my Art Station page where you can see a bunch of my latest work:

Visit my main web site here :

You can email me directly if you'd like :

Questions, business inquiries, support - or just to say hi!

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[drunkenant]

Wow, didn't know Xnormal had a function to convert object normal to tangent normal. I've been stressing out with this for so long! Thank you so much.

[darkobakula]

Couple of questions:
Wouldn't using a cage be better? Cageless baking is the way to go for lowpoly meshes that follow silhouette closely, otherwise you have to keep adjusting the ray distance value to make sure you don't get any ray misses. Whereas with cage you can visually adjust the ray starting points and directions and they will continue travelling even if they hit the low poly mesh surface before hipoly.
What is the point of object space normal map baking if Unreal supports Mikk Tangent Space Basis? As far as I'm aware, the biggest issues with game engine renderers is that they used their own proprietary tangent basis. This is why, back in the day, people had to use 3rd party tools such as Handplane to convert Object Normals into Tangent Space or a tool supplied by the game engine developer.
Wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing in this video by skipping the object space and going directly for normal map bake?

[eienjirosama]

I got a question. If you just didn't add more faces and edges on the front, and instead set the shading to flat, would the normals not still look good? the model is beautiful, I suck at all modeling.

[vigneshsrinivasan]

You're my Guru learnt a lot from your tutorials, started to learn so much about baking, gameart stuffs love from india! :D

[raz]

Thanks for your video man, muchly appreciated ^^

[DarrenLGoldsmith]

Hi Warren... great vid! Would you be willing/able to make that object available, so I could follow along more closely here?

[TheGeneralSoundwave]

Good afternoon Mr. Marshall, would you happen to know where to find the render to texture option / dialogue box, that bakes world-space normals instead of tangent-space normal maps?

[DesMonDLee]

Hi Warren Marshall i wanted to join the discord channel...but it says invite expired... :(

[jayattic]

Hey Warren, thanks for the video! I have a few questions: 1) can you mirror stuff in the lowpoly? Does that need to be done after the tangent space conversion? 2) I hear some people use handplane for the conversion, any thoughts on that? 3) since it's just smoothed normals, how do you usually combat projection errors? by adding geo?
Thanks again!

[pixeldoes...]

Thanks for creating this, I have been curious for a while what the advantages were exactly and it seems very nice to me. Being able to drop in a larger projected UV like that and not deal with vertex normals seems like a time saver to me. Does this method still play nicely with the rounded edge shader? I assume it would work fine.

[corvette]

I wont deny its a quick way to work and the end result is pretty cool, but i'm fairly certain I'd get murdered at work if I tried this. My technical lead always goes on about how vertex normals should always be on point (pun intended) and any method with bad vertex normals on the low poly being 'corrected' by a normal map from the high poly is unprofessional - in his opinion. My take away from this workflow is that its fast for a quick mockup or for your own indie title, but professionally or even for a portfolio piece- its probably not a good idea.