Ive been chipping away on this chonky Zelda character! Currently finishing up the blockout stage and I'll use this thread to keep posting little updates as I go.
"Hard UV shells - do you mean assigning different smoothing groups (in max terms) for each shell? Vertices are already separated there GPU-wise so what's the harm in separating smoothing groups too?"
Of course I won't blame you for asking a question, but this kind of "what's the harm" stance backed by some largely irrelevant tech justification is precisely how misinformation and bad practices spread, and how a project can end up with a convoluted (and sometimes straight up broken) pipeline. Because what is missing here is the experience of actually crafting organic models.
In some abstract theory land one could argue that "it doesn't matter, math is just math, the normalmap will be calculated to match anyways". But in practice that would introducing infinitely hard edges on the surface of something that is supposed to be perfectly smooth, and then asking for a normalmap to compensate for something it shouldn't have to (and breaking down catastrophically as texture resolutions gets lowered). Not to mention that some bakers may split the direction of the cast rays according to the mesh normals.
In context, a hand for instance would end up like the mess shown on the right here (and then requiring for the 3D lead to step in and waste a day to smooth out everything, rebake the asset and update/reintegrate multiple files - if that is even possible)
The right side is obviously bad practice.
The only reason I can think of why some people still do this after 10+ years of the baking workflow being the norm, is because they misunderstand the following : *if* a model has a hard edge somewhere (for whatever justified reason), *then* this edge needs to be a split on the corresponding UVs layout because otherwise it would create a bleed of opposide normalmap values over the edge, hence broken shading.
BUT no, each UV island 👏 absolutely 👏doesn't 👏 need to be hardened. And as shown above this isn't just a mere personal preference, as doing so can have practical, bad consequences on the final asset and shipped product. And that's probably the one thing that would deserve to be "hammered in" once and for all ...
Hey! I am working on stylized environment. I really liked the design of the Brazilian bar. I started with blocking out in Blender. Plan to make it in unity.
You can add a layer on top of all your details, set its blending mode.to passthrough on the normal and height channel, and add an Anchor Point to this rather than the details layer themselves.
Hello everyone! This character was created based on an amazing concept art done by Maxi Hoy, i decided to create the character in 3d in order to study and explore more the character art pipeline for Unreal Engine 5. The main focuses on this project: Improve my Unreal Engine 5 knowledge, understand the use of Detail tileable normals to aid the texturing/material process in Unreal, improve my texturing workflow and shader creation for realtime pipelines, hair creation and rendering using Fibershop, Blender and Unreal 5. I was able to learn a lot with this project, and i believe i will improve much more on the next one with the knowledge learned so far. Please, feel free to check more images on my Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YBV3aV i would like to say thank you to Maxi Hoy for the amazing concept art created. I hope you guys like it. Thank you!!