Question about low to high poly baking in regard to deleting faces that are not visible.

Irraka

Hey guys my question is let's say I'm making a table. The table consists of 4 wooden planks all placed right next to each other. When I UV map them should I keep the unseen faces of the planks (the sides that are next to eachother) or would you delete the unseen faces? Im just asking because Ive tried to do that but when Im trying to trim the edges of the planks in zbrush I cant trim the edge with the deleted face on. What do you guys do?

Mark Dygert

I leave them capped for the high poly.

For the low poly, it really depends on the engine and how well it handles shading and collision generation. In some engines it will cause weird shadows and lighting errors if the caps are missing. But in general I lean toward leaving them in because...

It's important to remember that most 3D software, game engines included run on verts. Weather it draws edges and faces between the verts is fairly minimal, until you start doing things to those faces like applying complex materials or lights.

If you delete one face of a box you didn't get rid of any verts, you still needs those verts to make the other faces, you aren't saving yourself much other than the face and the UV space which depending on how you unwrap it, is probably pretty minimal. To get any kind of vert savings out of a box you have to remove three faces that are connected, then you are only getting rid of a single vert. So trying to optimize a box is kind of a waste, especially if it causes weird shadows and lighting.

sprunghunt

If the planks are overlapping I would join them together in the lowpoly at the edges to make one continuous mesh. Otherwise it'll be too hard to bake the lowpoly.