Bake every asset?

sushi

I'm now used to creating high and low poly models for just about every asset to get that nice detail from a normal map bake and occlusion on the low poly.

This is great when working on hobby projects but what about in the real world? Is it worth it to do a bake for almost every asset for the sake of quality over time? Or is there another workflow that yields acceptable results with less time investment like dDO (haven't used, any good?)

As a 3D artist when it comes to developing high complexity projects with lots of machinery that benefits from those nice bevelled edge details, I'd like to know what the best approach to this situation would be.

SnowInChina

take a look at this

http://www.mapcore.org/page/features/_/articles/technical-breakdown-assassins-creed-ii-r24

WarrenM

If you CAN, my opinion is you should. Meshes benefit from normal maps in ways other than edges and details. Especially if anything on the mesh isn't flat. That high poly smoothing always looks better than vertex smoothing...

Bruno Afonseca

On a production environment you probably won't have time to bake it all, so you'll need to resort to shortcuts or approximations. nDo2 and Substance can get you some pretty good results. It all depends on the assets and their importance. And your deadlines!

Abdullah

i am not really a professional artist but i don't really create high-polys for every single asset. A cavity map and an AO from the low poly to itself is enough to bring up some details. Then i just apply details normal map to its surface.