Bevels and smooth groups (sharp edges) question.

S@murai

Hello polycounters!

I have question regarding use of smooth groups while doing bevels. Should I mark sharp edges like in picture below, or bevels will be enough when baking?
I want to achieve clean normal map without gradients and I'm not sure about this issue.

I will be thankful for help!

Joost

You can leave it all as one smoothing group, just make sure you have smoothing splits where you have UV splits. Also normal map gradients won't be an issue if you're using a synced tangent space workflow. If for some reason they are undesirable you could maybe try using face weighted vertex normals. Or have more uv splits.

WarrenM

Yeah, don't get hung up on gradients. All that matters is how it looks in the engine of your choice.

SonicBlue

I wouldn't mark as hard the edges in that outside corner, instead it would work better if you add another subdivision and make it more round, like I did here:



don't mind the n-gons ;P

S@murai

Thank you guys!