Preparing for Hi-Poly bake.
I made this simple model a little while ago for a game jam and I'm revisiting it to make a hi-poly version to bake down to a normal map. This will be the first time I've done this and I'm hoping some one can take a look and let me know if their is anything I need to do to prepare it.
Thanks,
Thanks,
Replies
Where ever you have a hard edge you should split your UV shell there as well. If you do not you will introduce small errors, usually on your 3D model you'll see little dark pixels on the edge.
Your low poly is a bit dense. The wires in particular looking at your UVs are using a lot of polys. The Flat bracket holding the Camera to the base at the top can be baked to the normal map, no need to model that in your low poly.
You do not need UVs on your high poly.
Another question. Once I bake the normal can I still re-arrange UVs, or will I have to rebake them?
You'll probably want your UVs to basically be pretty much set once you go to bake them. The nice thing is though for example, if you find during your tests you might need more detail in one UV island and less on another, you can simply change the UV map on your lowpoly and rebake the normal map. (nothing needs to change on the highpoly) You can probably fix somethings in photoshop if you don't want to rebake, but it really is best to get the UVs and bake as good as you can first before going into actual texturing.
It really depends on the model and how you're working, but there's plenty of folks who have normals actually baked out as different files, and then stitched together in photoshop (basically copy+pasting, cropping/masking/compositing them all together) This is usually do to a particular model being technically made out of multiple models/subobjects, and since they're overlapping each other baking the entire model at once would cause visual artifacts in the normal map bake due to the projections not being able to separate between the two correctly. This problem is usually corrected by baking each piece out separately and then stitching the normal maps of all the pieces together in one normal map sheet according to the UV maps.
But if you're just talking about one solid UV sheet and a one piece/single part bake it probably will be much faster just to rebake it after adjusting your UVs.
Regardless of all that, there's been plenty of times when I said the heck with it I could do better and went back to redo hours of work from the beginning as a design or certain aspect wasn't working. So don't be afraid to redo steps to improve!
Hope that helps/makes sense! Best of luck!