questions about baking hard edges and using cavity maps

kysg

Question.

Not sure but having some trouble with this recently.  Normally I would use 1 mesh 1 smoothing group in order to bake off bevels.  After this test though I may need to completely rethink this.

I did a test mesh and did some bevels on it with a fillet.

The high poly is on the right and the lo poly is on the left.



I've included test meshes for further review.

I wonder if I just made the bevel too small or is it a matter of using 1 mesh 1 smoothing group.

I know the other problem is due to skewing and that is fine.

Other question.
Using the curvature map in photoshop.  I have read a few threads on it but am wondering how I would set this map up?

Revel

Generally you want to break smoothing group when you have sharp angle turn, cus if not the gradient from your normal map will suffer when your texture get compressed.
Another thing is that your lowpoly mesh is not optimized, you might want to remove the support edges from there.

That UV definitely can optimized a lot more too, it's just a quick job split based on smoothing group. But you get my point.
About curvature map though, I'm not sure what you wanted to achieve with that..

kysg

I tried it again.

The one on the left has the splits at sharp angle turn and one on right has 1 mesh 1 smoothing group


Will test this out again tomorrow. 

I have included the normal maps for these.

My understanding is that for the curvature map is you can use that for edge distressing/edge highlighting?  Because AO I would use for dirt map/lighting.