Smart Normals - What's that?

yk89031

So I just watched a webinar by Forrest Stephan, CG Supervisor at Cloud Imperium Games (Star Citizen). At some point he talked about how they cannot fake detail with normals anymore and that they use something called "smart normals". I didn't hear about this approach yet and google didn't help much. Can anyone share a good source of information about these?



Here is the video: http://www.gameartinstitute.com/store/Ly2FjYFT
Smart normals talk is at 30:25

Thank you!

animax

I did not watch the complete video, but from what i understand, it's basically editing the vertex normal of the low poly mesh to reduce shading that we generally see. The terminology is what confused me, but this technique is being used for a while now and is pretty effective too.

You can read up more about it in Polycount Wiki HERE. Under Smooth Normals.

Found a well explained thread on polycount forum

Cheers.

animax

I did not watch the complete video, but from what i understand, it's basically editing the vertex normal of the low poly mesh to reduce shading that we generally see. The terminology is what confused me, but this technique is being used for a while now and is pretty effective too.

You can read up more about it in Polycount Wiki HERE. Under Smooth Normals.
Another polycount thread, discussing this in detail
http://polycount.com/discussion/154664/a-short-explanation-about-custom-vertex-normals-tutorial
Cheers.

leleuxart

Didn't watch the video, but it's probably just their term for the face weighted normals? A lot of games are using the technique now.

Kbrom12

Ya it's just what they call it; no different than custom vertex normals. 

almighty_gir

this is literally "let's make a buzzword for an industry standard that will look good to our backers".

Quack!

Look into Quad Chamfer for max if you want a non destructive way to do this technique.  Also look into Quad Chamfer if you want to speed up your high poly modelling by 3x.

yk89031

Thank you everyone for answers. I'm new in the industry, so I didn't know about weighted/smooth/vertex normals. Good to learn something new today.