zBrush Hard Edges Question

Sammy101

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9rZ_jSl6Ok

In the link above the sculptor does a great job of creating this sci fi box, but aren't the edges too hard for a solid normal bake? I get the gist of what he is doing and I could probably replicate it to some point, but it's all 90* angles for lots of the things and detail would be lost.

I try polish, smooth, and relax deformations, hPolish and etc, but I haven't seen anyone show me how to get a relaxed state of which I could obtain in 3ds max or maya with much healthier smoothed edges. I am just not that great at smoothing things out, but I am knowledgeable of getting good shapes and etc, just not for game engine normal baking status. Could anyone give me some tips?

Sammy101

Bump.

EarthQuake

Yes basically, these sort of super hard edges make for poor bakes, and unfortunately a lot of ZB hard surface work that I see looks like this. I guess its really hard to control bevels without going in and manually doing brushwork to get the right edge width.

Most of the stuff in this video can be done about equally as fast with traditional sub-d techniques, floaters, etc, but with better precision and quality.

Sammy101

EarthQuake wrote: »

Yes basically, these sort of super hard edges make for poor bakes, and unfortunately a lot of ZB hard surface work that I see looks like this. I guess its really hard to control bevels without going in and manually doing brushwork to get the right edge width.

Most of the stuff in this video can be done about equally as fast with traditional sub-d techniques, floaters, etc, but with better precision and quality.

Yeah I agree 100% about this being faster in traditional methods. I am very skilled in that regard. However I am wanting to be able to create everything in zBrush, and sadly have not figured out the methods of creating better smoothed edges for normals.

Thank you for replying.