Is it even worth it to bake normal maps for wires?

Joltya

I'm working on a couple of assets right now that have a bunch of wires, and I have some concerns about baking normal maps on them. Right now, I'm not sure if there would even be any benefits to baking them, because the normals are already facing the right way. If I bake a hi-poly wire onto a low-poly wire, there would be a lot of areas that I would need to adjust to get the two wired to line up. Should I go ahead and bake them anyway, or am I correct in thinking that there is no need?

Brygelsmack

Unless there's details on the HP wire, I wouldn't bother baking. If it's just a flat wire from beginning to end there's really no point in baking a normal map for it. Just softening the normals usually gets the job done.

WarrenM

I depends on how dense the wire mesh is. If it's medium-ish poly, the vertex normals are probably fine. Lower poly wires would benefit from getting the smoothness from the high poly, however...

slosh

yea, what sort of detail are you baking? most details for something like this could be easily done with NDO2 IMO.

kurt_hectic

I usually make wires from a triangle and bake a normal map for them. They look a lot more natural, more round. Of course it depends. If these wires are closer to the camera make them from a box. And test this technique. It could look bad in your engine.

Edit:
slosh
IMO normal map should define shape of the model, and after that details, but shape is a way more important. It's a bit an old school to think about NP as a bump map.