Baking maps for high poly cars - is it worth it?

dzibarik

I'm talking about cars for car-focused games - like simulators or racers. I think they are high poly enough and if you want to paint some damage, scratches and other noisy stuff you can always use 3D Coat/Substance Painter/whatever software which allows direct painting on normal maps. But I'm not sure if I'm right and may be somebody with more technical knowledge can share their experience?

EarthQuake

Generally with racing games you will see the assets skip highpoly baked to normal maps and use basically an optimized high poly mesh for the lowpoly.

Bruno Afonseca

What EQ said. Cars need to be super smooth and those kind of surfaces don't work well with normal map compression. I've seen it being used on isolated parts like logos, gas tank cap and such though!

dzibarik

thanks guys, I thought so.

Eric Chadwick

Depends on the target hardware though. Normal maps are sometimes better for a mobile game than a high vertex count.

A nice example of what's possible.
http://karolmiklas.com/gallery_2.html