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[Blender] high poly normal baking cylinder shaped objects question. is just purple OK?

oraeles77
polycounter lvl 7
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oraeles77 polycounter lvl 7
this object is a 'metal frame' its part of a larger object, but I've decided to bake several parts seperately before manually layering the normal maps to avoid 'pollution' etc, cause I dont want to waste 100 years playing with Blender's bias/distance features.

my question is this, the highpoly bits of the frame are 24 sided circle based, the low poly ones are 8 sided. after baking everything looks nice and purple. I've never been confident at baking curved stuff and I assume it must be a different colour to plain generic purple? does the purplr mean its ok or not ok? cause I always assumed the generic purple means its a flat surface and if you are baking a curve on to the lower poly, I'd expect darker or lighter tones, if that makes sense, but im not expert.





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  • oraeles77
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    oraeles77 polycounter lvl 7
    I baked this normal map in Substance designer, again, I got no idea if its a good one of a bad one.


    the area with the gradient fade, is the vertical poles of the cage. how comes the above normal map is different to the original one???


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  • Nosslak
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    Nosslak polycounter lvl 12
    The normals on the cylinder would look essentially the same on the two due to the smoothing so you'll only really see any information on the edges. However you don't have any bevels or anything on the edges so you wouldn't really see much from it either way, the normal map would just try to project the hard edge which won't look good. So put in a nice bevel or you might as well skip the normalmap on this model.
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  • oraeles77
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    oraeles77 polycounter lvl 7
    Nosslak said:
    The normals on the cylinder would look essentially the same on the two due to the smoothing so you'll only really see any information on the edges. However you don't have any bevels or anything on the edges so you wouldn't really see much from it either way, the normal map would just try to project the hard edge which won't look good. So put in a nice bevel or you might as well skip the normalmap on this model.
    how do you put a bevel on a cylinder? i mean the whole thing is nothing but bevels??! or am I wrong?
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