Should you high poly buildings then back onto low Maya?

ergoproxie

Hi there,

Burning question - do you always need to make high poly buildings to bake onto low ones? For example, the building I'm working on I've included - would you suggest I make a high poly of it to bake onto a low - or simply texture the low. The asset is for Unreal Engine and I texture in Substance Painter. 

Thanks!

Quack!

I would start by making a bunch of high quality tiling materials and then just model the game asset to those materials.  For a modern workflow, baking assets like this is not used except for some fairly rare circumstances.

ergoproxie

Thank you. I thought as much. I plan to texture it in Substance painter so should look fine without baking. Can I ask what are the kind of models you do low and high for? Is it mainly for highly detailed assets that the player will walk up close too? 

throttlekitty

There's never going to be an "always", it depends on what you're working on, how it's going to be used/tiled/reused, is it worth the time, etc. Nice scene by the way.

For considering the high poly, you've got a lot of wood beams that will probably end up using one or two textures within each set. So if you wanted high poly detail like rounded edges, or sculpted details like splintering and damage, yeah, a high poly would be helpful.

musashidan

If going the pure polygonal route(no high-poly bake) then you might want to add some chamfering/beveling on sharp corners, or use vertex shading.

You can add a normal map channel in SP and derive your detail from there: wood grain, damage, moss, etc.

ergoproxie

Ah yeah - I did initially think if wasn't going to go down the high poly route to add some light bevelling to the beams and paint in normal map scratches etc. in SP- similar to this: