Ideally I wanted to have the entire centre section of the environment finished, textured, normalled and so on but due to a few teething problems with baking this hasn't really happened. So far I have the final static mesh models with a set of unique UV's for lightmaps, with baked normal and ambient occlusion maps ready for texturing. Here is what they turned out like in the UDK.
[Despite being un-textured, the final mesh for the centre console area is coming out nicely and will look great once finished. A tiling issue with the uppoer canopy section needs to be sorted however. The ambient occlusion for some of the desk failed everytime baking in both Maya and xNormal so for the sake of time I have left it.]
[The normals on the static mesh are coming ot quite nicely]
One of the problems I have been having however is when creating a material, if I don't have a diffuse texture applied to the material when a normal is plugged in it appears dark black? So you cannot see the object at all once the material is applied to the static mesh. The only way to solve this at the minute is to apply a basic colour diffuse to the static mesh so I can see in the environment. I don't seem to recall this problem with UT3 and is a little annoying if you want to preview something without a diffuse and just a normal map.
Like I said before about slow progress this week due to problems, mainly down to high-low baking problems. The desk I had an issue with when using xNormal to make both normal and AO to the low-poly saying there was an n-gon face in the mesh and couldn't bake although I serearched the mesh long and hard and couldn't find one. Using Mays' transfer maps way seemed to work for normals but for the AO is failed massively and creating a mess of an ambient occlusion. This does bug me as I still am not 100% confident with baking high to low polygon models as I don't understand the problem it if goes wrong.
These problem really messed up my time shedule which has annoyed me a lot and worried me a little. My aim this week is work as hard as I can to catch up and really crack on with some texturing and I dont want to be caught out later on in the project with technical issues such as the computer screens which I feel I want to get done as soon as possible.
A sensible choice will be to post my projects on forums such as polycount and 3d-for-games to get feedback and help off others as the recent snow has rendered getting to University for help a little impossible.
Progress has been noted and its time to catch up!!!
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