123D Catch and Blender (high poly to low poly texture problems)

Hi everyone,

Quick summary of what’s below:

  • 3D photo captured myself as high poly model with textures (.obj)
  • Export creates 3 textures with various bits of myself and the environment I shot in scattered among them

What I struggle massively with:

  • Create a low poly version without messing up the textures whilst keeping high texture detail

Long version —

Here’s the set-up:

I used 123D Catch to capture a very high poly model of myself to use as a character for animation (and maybe games).

Alongside my desired model was a bit of environment, which I didn’t need, so I deleted that, and exported the desired model as an .obj.
This resulted in 3 texture files (.jpgs) with bits of the environment and different bits of me on it.

The desired outcome:
From this high poly .obj with its 3 texture .jpgs I want to create a lower poly model which retains the amount of detail displayed in the current texture files.

What I did:
I made a low poly version of the model by using Decimate.
I then attempted to create a normal map to make the model seem a lot more detailed than it is.

Problems:

  • The model has 3 materials, each of them assigned one of the 3 .jpg textures: This caused problems when trying to create a clean UV map (it creates 1 UV map for 3 different textures, resulting in various problems with assigning textures)

It basically stacks the 3 .jpgs (all of them have the same size) and puts on top of it the automatically generated UV map (so sometimes one shape will call my hair, other times my trousers, as these two textures are in the same position in the .jpgs).

I then had a problem creating a normal map texture as the other 3 would lie on top of it when creating it…

Any help appreciated!

Thank you

When baking a normal map the actual materials each object has is irrelevant.

You can use the Render / Bake options with the ‘selected to active’ enabled to bake a texture from one object with its own UVs to another object with its own UVs. The original object can have any number of materials applied to it. All the different material textures will be applied to the target object.

You need to supply more info on your scene. Minimum screenshots of all relevant panels and an example blend file

That makes sense.

I’ve taken two screenshots and uploaded the blend file to dropbox: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11014658/HightoLowbody.blend

Following normal map tutorials will result in existing textures to be displayed incorrectly, and I’m wondering if it’s because the .obj comes with the UV layer unwrapped already:



I circled the 3 materials/textures in red. On the left hand side is one of the texture files. When selecting the mesh, you can see some of it is assigned to a texture from a different file.

I’m wondering if that might cause problems?

I’m more than likely to be quite stupid with this, as I have no previous experience with Blender, so any help is very much appreciated!

So yeah, to restate the problem: When trying to turn the high poly mesh into a low one, I utterly fail in trying to bake normal maps onto the low one without messing up all the textures completely.

Thank you!