Normalmaps

Since I am a Zbrush lover now I decided to do more research on when I can use normal maps and displacement maps. Normal maps don't seem to be used in full animations and more often in games due to the in-ability to render AO passes properly but I figured using it for low level details like fabrics and generating a normalmap for that would be awesome.

Best tip of the day in that tutorial -

[Implementation] Obtaining Clean Results Using Hybrid maps

Baking - hybrid smooth/unsmoothed tangents using vertex normals (xNormal, maya) / smoothing groups. (max)

1. UV borders should generally be converted to hard edges, this dramatically reduces smoothing errors. (with no seam problems)

2. To reduce smoothing errors in an area, you can either split the uv map and introduce more hard edges - or manually round the geometry.

3. Experiment with your baking package to see how far you can push it - xNormal bakes for example have less smoothing errors than 3ds max bakes.

Here is a link to a good tutorial and a snippet I think I should keep in mind.

Area Autodesk Normal Map Tutorial