Baking + hard/soft edge. question

wirrexx

Oki so i finally got to know why my baking down normals look like shhhhh.
Basically my UW shells are all over the place annnnd i never played around with hard/soften edge tool. :O. shockingly.

so to my question.

When finishing of one low poly and doing hard/soft part. How do i know when to soften and when to harden?

This is what i think but i dont really know if its right. Basically, harden the edge where the seam is in a modell and soften th3 curvey part of a modell?

Eric Chadwick

Depends on how you will be rendering the finished lowpoly normal mapped asset.

If the final renderer (game) uses the same tangent basis method that you used to bake the normal map from the high poly model (baking tool), then you only need to use hard edges along the UV seams. And you need to use an averaged cage when baking.

If you don't have a match between the two, then you need to do more work with bevels and hard edges and etc.

wirrexx

Hmf, kind of confused Eric, first and most important, i really thank you for taking your time and trying to explain this!

Ok,now on too the confusion. Im confused mainly because people say otherwise "Soften Edge alont the UV Seams".

I'm using Maya 2012 for this!

Eric Chadwick

I'm not sure what the maya term is for this, but you want to break the vertex normals along your UV seams. I thought that was called a hard edge? In 3ds max, you would use different smoothing groups to do this.

m4dcow

wirrexx wrote: »

Im confused mainly because people say otherwise "Soften Edge alont the UV Seams".

I've never heard anyone say that, especially on polycount.

You typically want hard edges on spots where there is a drastic change in angle on your mesh. Where you have these hard edges... you also want to have a split in the UV shells (and those shells separated in UV space a bit or it doesn't matter).

There is another school of thought where people don't want to mess with many hard edges, so they will bevel or add support edges to places where there is a drastic change in geometry and just soften all the normals. Sometimes this can be useful, but can quickly get out of control and exponentially increase the polycount of an object.

wirrexx

Thank you guys for clearing this up for me, i think i got it. Back to trying and learning! CHEEERS have a superb night!