The right geo for good normal map.

Armitage19

Hey,

I am making a model and its my first one.
I think i overdid it a bit with details and came to 500k polys.
And because i am not sure how it should be the right way. And it looked difficult to do so.
I made the whole model to be out of one mesh. No floating geo or anything like that.
But, i want to use the model in Unreal 4 and maybe if that is possible, maybe someones like the model for something else.

I am almost finished with the design but i noticed... If i got a 500k poly model.. How to unwrap this? That would be a pain...

So, i started to take things a bit apart..
I made some parts like this.
I extruded a part and this cylinder goes into another cylinder.
If i would attach both meshes, there wouldnt be any overlapping faces or something like that. They are seperated like this but its hidden.




And then i have screws, a lot of them, i made them like this.
So they are modeled into the main mesh.



But, i wonder if i get problems when baking the normal map.
Never made one so i have no idea if it works or not.
What you think?


Thanks!


http://fs1.directupload.net/images/150810/ktu4hp3o.jpg

EarthQuake

500K isn't high for the highpoly. You don't unwrap the highpoly and put it in game. You make an optimized lowpoly, uv that, bake maps from high to low and put that in game.

Your other questions, there isn't enough information your post to answer them. I would suggest looking at some basic tutorials on normal mapping and trying it out.

Armitage19

So, i dont need to unwrap the high poly?

Ged

no you dont need to unwrap the highpoly. you should read up on normal mapping and exploding your mesh so that you can bake each component seperatly, theres tons of info here http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_map

Skumtron

You model the high poly in any way you want(subdivision surfaces, sculpting etc), with any topology that works, with any polycount your hardware can handle.

Then you retopologize the high poly model into a low poly model, carefully thinking what elements you have to build geometry for and what can be faked with a normal map.

You UV the low-poly object and then bake the normal map for it from the high poly object.