Bake soft and hard edges as normals on low poly

pixaeiro

Hello,

Is it possible to bake the soft and hard edges information into a normal map using only a low poly mesh?

Imagine I have a 10x10x10 cube, the top and bottom edge loops are hard edges, and the side edges are soft edges. I want to bake this edges information to my low poly as if the hard edges had a chamfer of 0.1, and the soft edges had a chamfer of 0.5.

This is a would be high poly cube to which I added the chamfers:



I want to bake the normals so that my low poly looks as if baked with the cube above as hi poly, but without using a hi poly, only the low poly.

Is it possible to do this?

Thank you!

AtticusMars

Not really sure what you're trying to describe. If you don't use a high poly mesh then what mesh are you using for your source normals? The same low poly?

The only way I am aware of that that might work is if you used a rounded edge shader.

pixaeiro

Yes, I want to use the same low poly, and its soft and hard edges info.
Let's simplify the problem. We have a cube with only the 4 side faces, no top, no bottom. All edges are soft. We bake each face to 100x100 pixels, and soft edges have a smoothing range of 10 pixels. 
Each row of the images would look something like this:

The transition from 0 to 10, and 90 to 99 will be smooth and consistent with a rounded edge (chamfer).
When rendered, the low poly cube will look as a if its edges were smooth.
The baker can easily generate these normals from the faces, and the distance of each pixel in the face to the closest edge, and it's vertex normal values.
I just wonder if any texture baker can do this!
Thank you!

JedTheKrampus

You mean a rounded edge shader? Modo can do that as can Mental Ray and possibly Vray, but it makes the bake take longer.

pixaeiro

Yes, that seems to be exactly what I need.
There is also a Blender Rounded Edge Shader!
Thank you!

AtticusMars

If you try the blender rounded edge shader and mange to get it to bake properly then please post about it and how you got it to work. I haven't seen anyone manage to get a clean bake with it.