Help my normal map a cone.

[SiliconPyro]

I made a simple cone, which is now working in game as a probe core. It's textured and to scale and it works great.

It's ugly though. I don't just mean the texture, but it needs to be normal mapped. I was following a tutorial on youtube, but when I started subdividing, I ran into a problem in that the edge didn't subdivide at all, so around the outside it still has 18 flat sides.

Can anyone help with this? I definitely had all the faces of the model selected.

Also, can anyone recommend a good normal mapping tutorial, video or otherwise, that could help me out? All I really want to do is smooth this thing into a cone.

[nli2work]

you won't need to normal map it. just put those faces in the same smoothing group. you might add a couple edge loops between the tip and the base of the nose cone to smoothout the vertical triangles. I don't know how to do it Blender, but you can do this in Unity, though you won't have control over individual faces.

In the Normals & Tangents section, change the Normals to "Calculate" in the drop-down. by default it's set to "Import".

then change the smoothing angle to something like 50 and click Apply. you'll see the mesh change in the preview window and the main window if you have in the scene.

smoothing angle means if two adjacent normals are X degrees or less apart; they are averaged into 1 normal. so a smaller number will give you more faceted look; a larger number will give you smoothed look. averaging between two normals that are two far apart will make the mesh look too round. generally a number between 30 to 60 is good to start with. You can experiment more and see how it works.

This generally works the same in any 3d app, blender or not. I just don't know how to do it in Blender.

[SiliconPyro]

Definitely looking better. Thanks, nli2work.

EDIT:

Love it! Now to improve this texture.

Edited August 14, 2014 by norcalairman