FPS Weapon + uv + normal map baking

Sixide

Hello people,
this is my first post here. I am 33 yo working as a 3d generalist. Ive never had the opportunity to make some high quallity AAA game assets, and i started a FPS gun (FN-SCAR) as a privat project. I already did the high and the low poly model, and also the uvs. It has about 14k tris, and im trying to make a bake as clean as possible. I have to triangulate the mesh before baking (as far as i know) in order to avoid any issues after exporting it into a game engine. My question is...im geting wavy normals on such places as the cylindrical shape on the 3rd screenshot. I have watched this tutorial [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY [/ame]
and the guy is suggesting to add a turbosmooth or to tessalate the object in order to avoid thoose waves, the point is, if i triangulate the mesh before that, as everybody knows, subdividing the mesh doesnt work with triangles. So can you give me one hint in order to bake such shapes clean? Do i have to add more loops ? And my next question is about the uv seams. Im having a lot of smoothing groups, and also many single faces, which im sure will be pretty hard to texture. What is the best sollution for it? Should i use only one smoothing group on such places with less seams as possible? Also if you have links to any good tutorial or guide, please feel free to post...sadly I've found only pretty simple tutorials, like cubes and primitives...
Thank you very much for your feedbacks!
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY"][/ame]

noosence

Understanding Averaged Normals

You're Making Me Hard


These two threads are a beautiful resource to dig through.

Stranger

Yeah those threads are perfect, also just by looking there's not enough geo to support the normal

JoshWilkinson

Triangulating is a tricky topic. I don't personally like to triangulate because it's borderline irreversible. But it does, for the most part, ensure that your normals bake properly. Because I don't triangulate often, i'll sometimes have bent quads and if I haven't triangulated those, I'll see it in my bakes. But for the most part a stronger understanding of topology will help you get away with mostly quads, which will help you iterate down the line if you need to. However if you prefer to triangulate (and there's nothing wrong with that) I recommend saving iterations fairly often s o you can always revert to a previous version.

Regarding your baking artifacts, the main takeaway I can offer is that you should add more geometry to your silhouette. I tried to think of an analogy to explain this as easily as possible but this is just such an abstract concept that it takes time and failure. But I can say that my school taught me to use as few polys as possible for maximum efficiency. It wasn't until later that I learned I was taught that by men who worked on early 3D stuff where restrictions were heavy and baking details wasn't even a thing yet. Today, baking is commonplace and the more your low poly silhouette matches your high poly, the better the bake.

As for your UVs, I personally like a lot of different shells because I get flatter bakes. Flatter bakes lend better to procedural texture but if you're texturing by hand, fewer UV shells will be much easier.

Also, I haven't seen the links noosence provided but they stellar. If you're the reading type (and I never was) I know you'll get the hang of it in no time. Somebody should have told me that one hour of reading could have saved me 5 hours of head-scratching trial and error.

Zezeri

Another thing I've noticed is that you might want to increase the padding of your UV shells a bit. Some of them seem to be very close to each other. This could lead to errors with mipmaps.

Tobbo

In regards to triangulating, it's not an issue if you have 2 separate saves, a working version (non triangulated) and a triangulated version (baking).

If you make adjustments or fixes do it in your working mesh (save it) and then triangulate and save the triangulated mesh to your baking file.

The only reason you want to triangulate before you bake is the game engine is going to triangulate your mesh anyway, but how it does it can be unpredictable and sometimes you get tangents that don't match your baked tangents. If you triangulate before you bake and before the game engine automatically converts your mesh into triangles you can ensure your baked tangents match the mesh ones.