Fighting normal map's resolution

dzibarik

After learning how to bake I've encountered the next problem I'm sure everybody here familiar with - normal map's resolution.

Personally I see two solutions here:

1)Pack everything VERY tight.
2)Separate meshes, do UV sheets for every one of them and then join them into a prefab inside a game engine (like for example weapons with scopes and so on).

But may be I'm missing something and there is some obvious method I don't know about? How do you deal with resolution problems?

ZacD

Post pics of the exact models and issues you are seeing.

dzibarik

it's not that I have a particular problem, it's about a general approach.

Here's the problem I'm talking about. Even if I mirror some of my UVs, stack UVs of symmetrical parts on top of each other I have troubles with resolution because there's not enough space.

huffer

You could also try to avoid having angled lines in your UV's - keep everything straight, horizontal or vertical, so jagged lines won't show up as much.

dzibarik

huffer wrote: »

You could also try to avoid having angled lines in your UV's - keep everything straight, horizontal or vertical, so jagged lines won't show up as much.

thanks, I didn't know that it affects smoothing.

huffer

It's mainly due to antialiased pixels becoming visible at low resolution - the horizontal line from the T looks good, no artifacts, because it's straight. This is why is important to have every straight line perfectly straight in your unwraps if your maps will be low res.

EarthQuake

dzibarik wrote: »

thanks, I didn't know that it affects smoothing.

It doesn't affect smoothing, but it does affect detail retention. For instance, you only really need one row of pixels to represent a perfectly straight line. However, you need at least two to represent a diagonal. Square pixels being what they are and all.

You can also exaggerate the shapes on your highpoly, make your bevels nice and fat/chunky and they will read better at a distance and hold better at lower texture resolutions.

dzibarik

thanks guys, straightening uvs helped a lot

fatihG_

What EarthQuake said.

Especially when I work with lower resolutions, I tend to exaggerate bevels so they read better overall.



Also notice that even though the uv's are perfectly straight, the version with the bigger bevels reads allot better, especially at a distance. How much you are willing to compromise realism for readability is completely up to you (,or the art director/style guide/etc.).

Basically what you should be thinking about when creating your high poly is how big the final asset will be on screen and the allowed texture resolution you can work with.