help me understand bevels and baking
polycounter lvl 8
Hi guys. Trying to understand a few things. I'm making a pretty in depth spaceship model and trying to figure out how to go about modeling it. All the spaceship game models I've looked at, a lot of the low poly meshes have small bevels on the edges. My question is, why bevel these edges if you're just baking down a high poly to a low poly? If you're beveling the edges, is there a point to normal mapping? Isn't the point of normal mapping to get nice rounded edges? Trying to understand how to go about this.
Can I just bevel my model, set up my smoothing groups, UV it and then texture it? Do I need to bake it from a high poly if I bevel?
Can I just bevel my model, set up my smoothing groups, UV it and then texture it? Do I need to bake it from a high poly if I bevel?
Replies
Stylistically you may want real bevels, but at a point they may not render very pretty and thin triangles are not performant anyways (two consequences of the same basic problem: you're rasterizing). Workflow-wise you may want to make heavy use of tiling/modular normal maps. Engine-wise you want to play to its strengths and reduce bottlenecks wherever they crop up. Here's a couple examples in increasing levels of complexity:
A highly stylized, cartoony game. Few hero ships, not often onscreen together, using real simple shading and lighting setups: Throw a ton of polygons at it to get nice surfaces and skip normals unless you need them. Easy peasy here.
A more realistic, densely detailed game, maybe with tons of factions with many of their own unique ships, lots of ships onscreen at once, and you need to maintain consistent visuals: Probably wanna use some modular modeling as well as a healthy amount of creative modular texturing. Fractured Space would be a good example of this. You probably don't wanna do real bevels here when normal maps can get the same look. You'll rarely be close enough to tell anyways, doubly so for regular players who aren't usually fretting over the details.
A very realistic game using complex lighting and shading models, and you see extreme closeups of the ships: Pull out all the stops. For quality, use decals like Star Citizen. Use beveled geometry in tandem with normal maps in order to get the best edge qualities for different sized surfaces without bottlenecking rasterizing. Get some coarse bounce lighting on the ship and high quality shadow maps, which will be even more convincing paired with higher detailed geometry.
Hopefully what this conveys is that you'll need to critically work out what are the very specific needs of your project. Balance these three factors within that framework, and you'll have the answers you need.
A question I had about making high poly models as well - I saw this mentioned here: https://80.lv/articles/designing-guns-for-games-tips-and-tricks/
The guy brought his model into zbrush and used polish to get nice beveled edges. Assuming he had to set up his model beforehand by putting in edge loops? Just a bit confused as how he got those nice edges in zbrush and what the point of doing it there if he's already setting up all his edge loops in Maya? Why not just smooth in Maya?
Is a nice way to make a complex object fast with nice looking edges.