I have spent the past few days baking texture maps for Crowe, which has proved a lot more difficult and fiddly than I found it before. I had problems with the high poly meshes from zbrush being too decimated or too thin, so shadows and backfacing polygons were showing up and causing problems all over the mesh. I also tried using xNormals as I have heard a lot of good things about it, and I especially liked the idea of being able to project the full quality of the high poly sculpt into the normal and ambient occlusion maps, however this presented errors.
I took steps to resolve the errors in both methods so I could use them both and compare the results. However, the problems with the 3DS Max method I am accustomed to were resolved first, so I decided this was the best option to save wasting any more time.
This stage of the project has been extremely tedious and stressful, but I am happy to say I now have usable normal and ambient occlusion maps. I will use the ambient occlusion map as an overlay on the diffuse texture.
Here you can see the effect of the normal and ambient occlusion maps on the white coloured model.
