Baking+Smoothing groups, am I doing it right?
polycounter lvl 12
Is this the correct method in baking a normal map from highpoly to lowpoly, in regards to smoothing groups?
1) First I attach any floating geo together so I have one solid lowpoly mesh
2) I select the entire LP mesh and "Clear All" from the Polygon: Smoothing Group menu
3) I click the "1" to assign all of it to group one and left the Autosmooth number to the default 45
4) I bake out my normal map
So then after I put my normal map on and I notice that some parts are still showing hard edges. At this point, can I actually adjust the smoothing groups some more? Or am I suppose to increase that 45 degrees to higher and then rebake? I tried setting the value higher than 45 and then clicking "Autosmooth" and it kinda smoothes out the edges some more but then I think it also creates many seperate smoothing groups? I'm a little confused, am I suppose to keep it all in one smooth group in order to be game engine compatible or something?
1) First I attach any floating geo together so I have one solid lowpoly mesh
2) I select the entire LP mesh and "Clear All" from the Polygon: Smoothing Group menu
3) I click the "1" to assign all of it to group one and left the Autosmooth number to the default 45
4) I bake out my normal map
So then after I put my normal map on and I notice that some parts are still showing hard edges. At this point, can I actually adjust the smoothing groups some more? Or am I suppose to increase that 45 degrees to higher and then rebake? I tried setting the value higher than 45 and then clicking "Autosmooth" and it kinda smoothes out the edges some more but then I think it also creates many seperate smoothing groups? I'm a little confused, am I suppose to keep it all in one smooth group in order to be game engine compatible or something?
Replies
If you change smoothing groups at all, you will need to re-bake any normal maps.
You do not have to keep everything as a single smoothing group if you don't want. You should avoid the "Auto smooth" button since then you're not really controlling your normals at all. Set everything to one smoothing group, then you can assign some polys to other smoothing groups if you need to split the normals anywhere.
I recently split up smoothing groups on a character (stone gargoyle) that I wanted to be somewhat faceted but not at every poly.
What I did was select the poly groups in edit mesh, added smooth, picked a new group, collapsed to edit mesh and repaeted for other smooth groups. Is that the way it's supposed to be done? I couldn't figure out how to select seperate polys in the smooth modifier.
I can start a new thread I guess if this is a bad spot.
What does this really solve? I've run into a lot of cases where i need to break an edge that isnt on the border of the uvs. With any sort of complicated mesh this will likely be the case, unless you're spliting your uvs up when more than you need to.
Yep. That's what it solves.
and vert count, not polycount is what matters for realtime meshes.
only if the bevel has uv space. :P
not that you would ever want to bevel the edge and not give it uv space.
but we still kind of go by this rule at work, bevel the edges instead of making smoothing groups, it just looks better and we haven't come across any instances where it added thousands of polies to the final product.