High to Low Poly Bake

Once all my pieces were completed I need to finally create my normal maps for the head and body and my character will then be complete, to do this I imported both the high poly model and low poly models of both of these into a Maya scene, I then first selected the low Poly head and moved it to the centre of the world and then did the same with the high poly head once both were sharing the same space I started to use the outliner to easily select what I want.

I then went to rendering and pressed transfer maps while having the low poly mesh selected this will bring up the options box for the high to low poly bake, the first thing I needed was a source mesh to get the detail of so this would be my high poly head once these were set up, I then moved the envelope of the low poly so it covered all the details on the high poly, once this was set up had to select the maps I wanted so I selected a normal which is for the bump and diffuse map for the colour, then I went to Maya common output options and increased the map size so I could get all the detail I need I changed this to 2048 and the high quality 8x8 and set the save file to be a PSD so I had a master copy to edit if I needed to later on.

I then pressed bake and had to wait 40 minutes while this made my maps for me, once this was completed I came back to see my low poly now had all the details and colour of the high poly with only a fraction of the poly count, I then saved this and then moved on and repeated the exact same process with no difference for the body, which gave me these results.

I was happy with how these bakes came out since I wasn’t expecting that amount of detail in the maps and on the low poly. Im glad I did this because it gave me good practice on the baking process and really helped me to understand it better.