Which smoothing group approach is the best?

loggie24

Hi. I'm making a battle axe and i'm not sure which smoothing groups approach is the best.

In the pictures, you can see i have given each side one smoothing group, and the other one i have given the rings one and the rest another one. I get more artifacts on the one with one smoothing group.

Sorry if it's a bit unclear, if you need more info just tell.

WarrenM

Pictures aren't showing...

loggie24

They aren't showing because i'm too stupid to upload them. 2 sec

Joost

Are you baking from a high poly? Or planning on doing unlit hand painted textures?

loggie24

Baking from a highpoly

Joost

The smoothing of your low poly will look bad without a normal map applied. Just make sure you have smoothing group splits at UV seams. There's a script in Textools to do that automatically.


http://www.renderhjs.net/textools/

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

loggie24

I get that. I was simply wondering which one of the two is the best one. After a test bake i went with the one to the left because i did get noticeable artifacts even with a normal map applied on the right one (and i used textools as you recommended, great tool).

Joost

You're probably getting artifacts because you're not using a synced work flow. You should only need smoothing splits where you have uv splits.Try baking an object space normal map and using handplane? Also are you baking with a cage? I suggest you read the thread I linked above. It's hard to definitively tell you what the cause is as there's many possible factors.