Can we make hard edges look rounded without baking from high poly?

mzprox

Asking this question because I see less and less need for baked normal map recently.We can put in 'high poly' details directly on low poly using for example substance painter or ndo, and baked normal maps can have errors too often, needs tweaking etc, so maybe we can avoid baking especially for hardsurface objects. I think the only detail we can't paint on the low poly is the rounded look of hard edges..but maybe there is a trick already. Any thoughts?

Bal

I think you're under-estimating the advantage baked normal maps can have for hard-surface stuff... But if you just want those round corners but don't want to bake them, might as well just model them out and tweak the surfaces' vertex normals.
http://born-robotic.com/stuff/cubenormals.jpg

Obscura

Exactly. You can add chamfers, and adjust the vertex normals, and it can look round without any baking.

mzprox

Interesting, What is the best way of adjusting vertex normals? Can it be done in blender?

Obscura

http://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/modify/normal_edit.html

WarrenM

If available, look for a "face weighted normal" script for Blender. That will give you these sorts of results with really no effort on your part. Small faces count for less in the vertex normals so it looks like the second shot above.

Xizu

MODO has that rounded edge shader which looks like it should be in every software. It has serious potential.

There is a bevel shader for Blender but it doesn't seem to be working (well) at the moment and it's CPU-only so takes a large amount of processing time to render.

mzprox

Xizu wrote: »

MODO has that rounded edge shader which looks like it should be in every software. It has serious potential.

There is a bevel shader for Blender but it doesn't seem to be working (well) at the moment and it's CPU-only so takes a large amount of processing time to render.

This is similar what I had in mind.. If only it could be drawn out on a normal map.. I think technologically it could be done

mzprox

Found the topics where this technique was discussed.. would be nice if this would be a better integrated workflow in each 3d package.. especially in Blender since I'm using it .

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=71995&highlight=effort+normal+map
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=146280