NDo2 vs. Baking

nak1411

I am a bit new to baking and normal maps so bear with me if this is a stupid question.

Recently I have been working on some game assets and instead of baking from high poly to low I would just use the lowpoly UV map to generate a simple normal map with ndo. Then I would "handpaint" all the smaller details and tweak it. I was able to achieve very good results and it seemed I had a lot more control on what the outcome would be. Didn't have to deal with any baking artifacts or weirdness. It didn't seem to take that much more time as opposed to modeling floaters or deal with messy topology of a high poly.

I am wondering if I am missing something or if this is frowned upon for some reason unknown to me? My assets were hard surface though, but I can understand why organic modeling would probably benefit more from an actual geometry bake.

WarrenM

All you got were details. You had to use vertex normals for edges which never looks as good as baking from a high poly.

Do a combo ... bake for edges and large forms, nDO2 for details. It's a valid work flow.

EarthQuake

Yeah, there are certain things you'll never get from a painted bump converted to normal map/ndo/crazybump/knald/etc.

Larger forms, beveled edges, etc you really need to model a proper high poly mesh for. A painted normal can also never account for the smoothing of the lowpoly mesh either. When you bake a normal map from high to low its not just capturing the details (unless its a flat plane or something, but not for anything more complex) what its doing is transferring the mesh normal information, or rather, replacing the low poly's mesh normal with that of the high, which can't be faked with a simple 2d map.

You can't really "paint" beveled edges, especially which complexities like hard edges on your lowpoly, you can't paint smoothing compensation to make a lowpoly mesh with averaged normals appear to have totally flat, mechanical surfaces, etc.

Like Warren says, the best thing to do is model the content that makes sense to model (large forms, precise mechanical shapes, etc) and do in 2d the stuff that is easier there (panel lines, complex patterns, or other fine details).

nak1411

Thanks for the replies. Yeah I see what you guys mean. Makes sense. Here is what the end result was of just painting them on.




It is close I suppose but yeah you can just tell it looks painted on and kind of squared off.

Gazu

When i started baking my first Normal Maps i tought like you.
I tought that ndo can make a HighPoly NormalMap from the LP Wireframe.
This would be a very cool function, but at the moment its not

All the Soft HighPoly Edges have to been baked from a HighPoly Mesh.
nDo cant make this
Maybe quixel can code something like this
Smooth and soft edges from LP Wireframe, would be very very cool!

And yeah, use ndo2 to paint details on your baked, existing normal map.

Gazu