Characters with swappable heads - Shading issues

Bruno Afonseca

Hey hey!
So, I'm working on a project (Unity, iOS) where you can customize your character by choosing between different heads.
The thing is, since the head and the body are different meshes, the normals along the split aren't aligned, thus giving some harsh shadows in that area.

Do you guys know any possible solutions for this?

almighty_gir

i've found that when dealing with stuff like this, you have to make the body and head as a single mesh, then split the low poly where necessary, then bake the normals.

remember when making the different heads, that you can only change the high poly up to a certain point, after that it has to blend up to the edge that's split.

Noors

You have to edit your vertex normals in your 3d software so they match and pray that your exporter supports it.
It's pretty easy to do in max with edit normals modifer.

Ace-Angel

Choker? Neck-chain? Scarf?

How much skin does the character show? Can you cut more for the head?

Plus, what the other guys said.

Mark Dygert

Design the characters around the transition.
- Characters have busts instead of heads, clothing goes over the busts.
- Everyone wears full body underwear and the interchangeable pieces swap out at the natural seams.
- Everyone wears a choker.

Depending on the strength of the programing team they might be able to copy the normals from the body and force them onto the head and then weight those verts 100% to one bone (top of the spine).

I'm assuming that you're talking about the actual normals for the low poly and not the normal values in a normal map? I'm not even sure normal maps could work in iOS?

Bruno Afonseca

Normals on the low poly!

I can't design around that since the characters are already made. I just gotta make them work!
It's running on Unity and I'll export them as .FBX, gonna try that Edit Normals thing then!

Mark Dygert

FBX supports "explicit normals", in the Geometry rollout of the export options, I think its the "Tangents and Binormals" check box. I had to do it with UDK a while back which supports explicit normals, at least on static props, I don't know if they ever added support for explicit normals on deforming meshes.

The question is does Unity support explicit normals and if it does, is that on deforming meshes or just static meshes...