Smoothing groups when baking?!?

GrungyStudios

Hey guys, real quick and easy question. When baking out normals, are you suppose to have no smoothing groups, organized smoothing groups or everything set on 1 smoothing group? My teacher told me no smoothing groups at all but when i bake it out it looks like shit and im basically loosing all smoothness from my highpoly.

or do you change it depending on model? for example something hardsurface, bake with organized smoothing groups, but something organic all set to 1 smoothing group? Please i need help i want to improve my bakes

Xenobond

For the most part you are going to want to have your smoothing group splits match your UV splits. This also means that you're going to want to pay attention to how you split your UVs so that your smoothing groups are not going to cause issues.

So on a cube, I would unwrap it like a baseball as opposed to an unfolded cross.

metalliandy

You can bake with zero smoothing groups but there isn't much point really. You need the baker to match the tangent basis of the renderer perfectly and it can cause problems when the normal map gets mipped. As such unless you are using object space normal maps I wouldn't generally recommend this.

As Xenobond said it's best to add your smoothing groups after unwrapping so that each UV island/UV Shell is a separate single smoothing group.
This will give you less gradation so it will match non-synced engines better, is free to add and can help with texturing down the line.

Ghogiel

Even if the tangent basis matched between renderer and baker I would still bake with a cage and add hard edges at UV splits on hard surface models as it clears out gradients in the normal so it compresses better and doesn't mip badly.

I have friends that still don't get it and come at me with "look I can just extract maps in mudbox and they render perfectly in maya" even though the target platform is CE3.

*slap*

metalliandy

Ghogiel wrote: »

Even if the tangent basis matched between renderer and baker I would still bake with a cage and add hard edges at UV splits on hard surface models as it clears out gradients in the normal so it compresses better and doesn't mip badly.

I have friends that still don't get it and come at me with "look I can just extract maps in mudbox and they render perfectly in maya" even though the target platform is CE3.

*slap*

Yea, you should always bake with a cage unless you are baking to a single quad.

seth.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

^^ this bad boy is stickied for a reason, have a read through, that should help you make sense of it all