Need advice on normal baking an airplane

VonDoom

Hi, I am making a DH100 Vampire and right now I am at the stage of preparing the highpoly normal bake.

What I have in mind is to animate the model in the future, and to do so, I have seperated geometry like the flaps, rudder, airbrakes and such, and I need some advice on how to bake these separated parts and maintain the resolution of the UVW's relative to the much larger fuselage.

Any advice on a good workflow would be much appreciated ! Thanks

Synaesthesia

What part of the high-poly did you model? Round edges or all of the paneling details? I'd personally avoid creating a high-poly bake for aircraft - they're very organic surfaces with hard-surfacing mixed in, making it difficult to get a noticeable bake. Something you might want to try would be to use the custom vertex normal technique to get the appearance of round edges inside of the low-poly, and use a tool like NDO to add your panel lines, bolts, and other assorted details.

This is the same technique I use on my aircraft. An example of this would be my F/A-18E Super Hornet. Some of the normal details are a little strong (due to using an outdated hand-painted heightmap to normal workflow) but the core concepts are still there.

AlecMoody

It depends a lot on how the model is going to be used. For a prop plane in an FPS, I would want to bake normals. For a super high detail model for a flight sim, I think you would be better off with some kind of mid poly modeling workflow similar to how cars are modeled for racing games.

VonDoom

@Syna , I have not made anything highpoly yet, I have just completed the lowpoly.

 So you tell me there are two options, use vertex normals to emulate rounded edges on the lowpoly or bake the thing per usual to get round edges. The Hornet looks really great, and I read the thread you linked me to, but you still need to add a simple chamfer to the lowpoly's hard edges, right? Wont that add a lot more geometry to the model?

Mind if I can see the wireframe of the Hornet by the way?

@AlecMoody , I am ditching the animation idea and keeping it simple. This will just be a semi-realistic static model I will upload to Sketchfab.

VonDoom

So, something like this?