Do i need to worry about shading in SG/UVW Split workflow in the LowPoly?

HCPC

So i'am basically using this workflow: I create lowpoly, then i create highpoly & then i move to creating uvw's and after i done that i use textools to load smoothing grps from uvw shells. The question is should i be worried about shading the in the lowpoly? will those shading errors carry out from the normals to the lowpoly? I have image of the mesh here as you can see the bottom mesh has shading issues and what i did in the upper mesh was i added small loop to control the shading better. So is this nessecary should i add support loops like this? or will the normals fix it later after i bake and apply the normal texture in the low poly?

HCPC

Okey i did small test & i just noticed what is causing these shading issues after bake in Unreal 4. The reason i get those shading issues was that i collapsed my lowpoly mesh... The one in top is lowpoly mesh that i collapsed in 3DSmax ( you can see shading issues) and one in the bottom is the mesh that i just left in parts in the scene in 3dsmax Picture here: https://gyazo.com/323fc4acc541454955889bc15d4a778d. Anyone know why this happens?

pior

"... to load smoothing grps from uvw shells"

This is a popular misconception - you absolutely do *not* need to do that. What you need to do is to make sure that every hard edge is also a UV split, not the other way around.

Now of course one could argue that a brute force approach doesn't hurt, but I personally believe that it is much better to first and foremost understand the "necessary and sufficient conditions".

As to your original question : Yes, you should definitely be worried about the shading of the lowpoly The more clean habits you develop in that regard, the more solid your bakes are going to be since lowpoly shading and bakes are intrinsically related. Support loops added after the fact are not needed - you will be much better off using weighted normals, or even simply more geometry to begin with. And of course, triangulating everything.

Good luck !

HCPC

pior said:

"... to load smoothing grps from uvw shells"

This is a popular misconception - you absolutely do *not* need to do that. What you need to do is to make sure that every hard edge is also a UV split, not the other way around.

Now of course one could argue that a brute force approach doesn't hurt, but I personally believe that it is much better to first and foremost understand the "necessary and sufficient conditions".

As to your original question : Yes, you should definitely be worried about the shading of the lowpoly The more clean habits you develop in that regard, the more solid your bakes are going to be since lowpoly shading and bakes are intrinsically related. Support loops added after the fact are not needed - you will be much better off using weighted normals, or even simply more geometry to begin with. And of course, triangulating everything.

Good luck !

Hey man!

I use txt tools plugin  to load smoothing grps from my UVW splits i'am pretty sure i'am doing it correctly as i'am following this tutorial video 100% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9wgKy-F1Rw&index=1&list=FLE1jciHeP-TxJrUtXX1IjAg&t=2927s what about collapsing my lowpoly mesh in 3dsmax why does it make these shading problems appear?

pior

Hi there - Well, the fact that a tutorial says you should do it does not mean that it is a necessary and sufficient element of the workflow - it's just the (bruteforce) workflow of that person, which happens to work well for that knife model. But again that's just a widespread misconception ... that eventually leads to many misunderstandings

As for the collapsing bit, unfortunately I can't give you advice on that as I do not use that workflow/environment.

HCPC

pior said:

Hi there - Well, the fact that a tutorial says you should do it does not mean that it is a necessary and sufficient element of the workflow - it just is the (bruteforce) workflow of that person, which happens to work well for that knife model. But again that's just a widespread misconception ... that eventually leads to misunderstandings

As for the collapsing bit, unfortunately I can't give you advice on that as I do not use that workflow/environment.

Hey man i understand that people have different workflows etc but this guy uses this same workflow for pretty much everything he does guns, knives grenades etc and i'v seen many other people use it too so it is matter of what people wanna use as their workflow & what works for them ? Thank you for responding to me btw

pior

No problem, my pleasure

So ... what matters is to understand the reason behind why something is being used. And hardening the edges all UV shells is 100% unnecessary, regardless of how many people do it. As said : once you understand the necessary and sufficient conditions (i.e. not relying on a bruteforce approach "just because"), you will get a much better understanding of how these things work.

HCPC

pior said:

No problem, my pleasure

So ... what matters is to understand the reason behind why something is being used. And hardening the edges all UV shells is 100% unnecessary, regardless of how many people do it. As said : once you understand the necessary and sufficient conditions (i.e. not relying on a bruteforce approach "just because"), you will get a much better understanding of how these things work.

Thank you! Yeah i will look into these things more in depth soon