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Mirror and weld modeling workflow with baking?

polycounter lvl 6
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DirtyBlueFL polycounter lvl 6
Hello friends and associates, I am working on a sword for a VR game mod, and I've opted to mirror and weld one half of the sword so I can maximize pixel density in the materials. This is the first time i've ever made an asset with baking where I didn't just lay out everything in the UVs with no overlapping. So of course, I've run into some questions (problems) along the way.

My workflow was as follows in Maya 2017:
>Build the full high poly, both left and right, using subdiv smoothing. Multiple submeshes were used, but this didn't cause any problems.
>Retopo one half using Live Surface and Quad Draw tools, as one contiguous mesh.
>Create smoothing groups by selecting edges and setting them to hard or soft
>Unwrap
>Bake normals and AO using the low poly half and its cage, on the full high poly mesh
>take that half, with baked maps, and texture it in Quixel

At this point, I stopped to check my theory on how I'm going to execute the mirror and welding, and ran into some problems.

When I mirror and combined the mesh (no merge/weld) sometimes smoothing groups break.

Why? Is this just a problem with Maya? I have to go in by hand and fix edges.

When I mirror, combined, and merge/weld, smoothing groups always break.

Why? Is this just a problem with Maya? I have to go in by hand and fix edges.

When I soften the new edge down the center, I get a harsh seam down the middle.

Is this because the half-bake considers the outer edge as a hard edge, and by softening the new center line, I am essentially giving the low poly smoothing data that does not match the bake?

When I mirror, merge, and don't soften that edge, things look great, other than the broken smoothing I fix by hand.

Should I go into the UVs and split the islands outer seams? When I merged, the UV verts also merged. I have player around with mirrored geometry assets from AAA games, and their UVs were overlapping and mirrored, but NOT sewn together. Am I missing a step?

Can you point me to workflow guides? The way I'm working now is just my interpretation of what I think I know about the process. Is Maya maya at fault for the broken smoothing, or am I just overlooking a setting?

Broken smoothing groups in the low poly


Mirrored, welded, hard edge down the middle


Mirrored, welded, soft edge down the middle



Some renders

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