Blender question regarding soft/flat shading on this low poly model I am making.

oraeles77

which type of shading is correct for the low poly?

I like the soft shading but I find it has a horrible gradient of light on it which looks ugly, the bottom picture is the model with soft shading on the bevel parts and flat shading on the flat parts. it will have a high poly model baked on top of it, there is still a lot of work to do.

is the bevel area marked in green ok?

afterwards I will bake it in Substance Designer then export everything to unity.

FourtyNights

When you're baking a normal map from HP to LP, you'll need to remember this rule "You'll need an UV seam split on every sharp edge, but you don't need to add a sharp edge for every UV seam".

Even though your beveled model with those kind of sharp edges looks good shading-wise, it forces you to place UV seams onto your sharp edges, and you'll end up with lots of unnecessarily small and thin UV islands.

You have two options: 1. Leave the original "ugly shading" as is and let a normal map handle things, or 2. Use custom weighted face normals.

For the 2. option, the "Blend4Web" addon has really good normal weighting tools:
https://www.blend4web.com/pub/blend4web_addon_17_12_0.zip

Don't extract anything. Install it as a .zip file in Blender. This addon is for the latest Blender 2.79 version.

Here I made similar beveled meshes you have there. The mesh on the left has properly weighted vertex normals, and the mesh on the right has Blender's default averaged smooth vertex normals, like you have on your smooth model.

GREEN: If the "Angle" setting on the Auto Smooth setting is greyed out, it means you have custom normals on your model.

BLUE: If it says "Clear", it means you have custom normals on your mesh, but if it says "Add", it means you don't have custom normals on your mesh.

RED: When weigting your vertex normals, select all your faces which point their face normals to a same direction, and click that "Face" button. Repeat it for all the flat faces.

Usually when using custom normals in Blender, I don't recommend to mix sharp edges with them at the same time. It's a bit buggy. Generally both of these meshes give you good normal maps no matter what, BUT the weighted one works better with mipmapping.

Last advise: Remember to triangulate your mesh before baking if you didn't know that. Add a "Triangulate" modifier for your finished low poly model.