more triangles or normal map?

David1983

hey guys,
Can someone tell me what the better way of making asset in a modern engine like UE4 is...
Is it better to add like 1000 or 2000 more triangels to an object or is it better to bake a normal map instead of this additional "chamfer" triangles ?

passerby

well pretty much all modern games use both, normal maps can only fake shading, they cant change the silhouette.

So make the silhouette look good, increase the amount of polys if you need to, but for surface details, especially if they are on a flat surface, just bake that detail into the normal map.

It is really hard to explain what should be modeled in the lowpoly vs what can be done with a bake and normals, but you will get a feel for it eventually after working on your own stuff, and look at others art.

David1983

perfect thanx!

fade1

I'm not a coder and it depends on the engine. but nowadays everything is quite similar. to keep it simple: adding a second texuture means twice the load for the engine. if you can avoid a normalmap or any other new texture, you could use twice as many vertices for roughly same performance.
practically i would always do both, because you probably will always have a normalmap for current gen games, but you will need the chamfers to get better/cleaner vertex shading. if you bevel a hard edge you will have same vert count and same performace as you will avoid vertex splits. plus you will get a cleaner shading with less aliasing.