Transfer vertex normals on models other than hair/foliage?

Leinadien

After doing hair for the first time it occured to me that maybe one could transfer vertex normals from the high resolution sculpt that you bake your normal map from onto the low resolution mesh. Would this be a good idea, do people do it?

throttlekitty

It's not uncommon to do for LODs. For a typical hard surface low poly all you'll end up doing is skewing most of the edges you need hard and planar to the nearest part of a bevel. So no, it's not typically a good idea there, just too messy and inconsistent. For organic models it may work, I'd be curious to see if anyone has tried it there.