In this session, we were showed how to use a program called 'XNormal' in order to generate normal maps and bake ambient occlusion. We would be using the same turret we had been working on in past lessons. Whilst baking textures is possible in Maya, Robin chose to show us how to use XNormal as it is, whilst old, a robust program.
This is my ambient occlusion texture. Ambient Occlusion is a (somewhat crude) method of simulating how light bounces off of the environment and illuminates a surface. Since running a physically accurate simulation of light is unfeasible in real-time, Ambient Occlusion maps are an appropriate substitute that 'fakes' a similar effect. Some modern games have other methods of simulating global illumination in real-time, and there are very advanced methods of generating ambient occlusion in real time as well. However, when it comes to intricate detail, a baked texture must be used, as the power isn't currently available to perform accurate global illumination on small detail.
This is how I edited my ambient occlusion texture in Photoshop. I simply got a metal image off of Google Images, then pasted it over my texture. I set the layer blending method to Overlay, so that the ambient occlusion was still visible through the metal layer.
This is my normal map. Normal maps are a method of faking greater detail on a surface than what is actually present. In a normal map, the hue of a pixel is read by the renderer as the angle of a surface, and the saturation dictates the adjacency of that pixel against the polygonal surface the map is applied to. The renderer uses this information to shade pixels that would be shadowed if the surface it's representing was actually modeled. This is an effective illusion, but the surface still appears clearly flat when viewed up-close or at an angle.
My textured turret.
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