Can you bake with averaged normals when not using one smoothing group?
polycounter lvl 3
Hey 
I wanted to know if I make a mesh where I use a different smoothing group for each UV island, can I still bake with averaged normals in painter? I thought it would be forced to non averaged because I'm not using a single smoothing group on my lower poly mesh.
Thank you!
I wanted to know if I make a mesh where I use a different smoothing group for each UV island, can I still bake with averaged normals in painter? I thought it would be forced to non averaged because I'm not using a single smoothing group on my lower poly mesh.Thank you!
Replies
Opps... I just tried putting my stamp on my high poly near the edge and it does skewing on averaged normals, so I see now you can bake with either setting. I then did a test with an averaged mesh and using the option makes no difference if I toggle average on or off in painter. I found on the painter forum that is happens because when you use a single smoothing group you've manually set it to averaged and without a split using non averaged has no effect.
I got confused because when I see tutorials and course people usually uncheck averaged normals in painter's bake settings when doing split edges.
Is it correct to uncheck averaged normals in the bake when using the split edges way instead of a single smooth group on the low?
No because the cage will then have gaps in the projection where the edges are hard.
The whole point of the averaged projection normals is to override the vertex normals of the mesh, which will probably be terrible to use as cage if you use hard edges on it.
I'm really confused on why I see this unchecked when people do hard surface models in their courses.
So if I understand this correctly if you use averaged normals even with edge splitting you're preventing gaps in the projection. My final question is why would someone use edge splitting instead of just using a single smooth group for the entire mesh? The only difference I can see is one smoothing group leaves a gradient on the normal map bake, and using edge split does not, and if I can use edge splitting I can get a bake without that gradient. I also see that you'll still have skewing unless you had support loops regardless of either single smoothing group or edge split when using averaged normals.
Thank you so much, I'm still learning and this helps a lot
This is a video where he unchecked averaged normals.
I'm trying to understand why?
As for why people use hard edges, yes it's because how the low poly shades is somewhat important to how your bakes will come out. Smooth shading might look like shit if there isn't enough geometry to help the LP shading. And sometimes people don't want to mess with custom normals. Often times minimising strong gradients in the normal is necessary if you use LODs, it all depends on what you are baking and what for. And just using hard edges to control the LP shading is tried and tested so people stick to that a lot.
Yes, averaged projection cages will always skew the surface unless it's a flat plane or something. The only thing for that is using skew correction in designer or marmoset. Or adding a load of extra loops baking to object space, then converting that map to tangent space using the model with the extra loops removed.
Painter doesn't have skew correction, so sometimes its not the best choice for a baking hardsurface.
I know if you have a cage the option is grayed out and I would have to make sure my cage is averaged manually otherwise it would bake as if it was non averaged. I've also seen this done not just on this videos but many others so naturally I'm going to wonder why this workflow exists.
I know I've seen posts by @musashidan who advocates for the a single smoothing group, but also talked about how some people blend averaged and non averaged. So there has to be a reason painter has the non averaged option.
I've seen this post: https://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts/p1 where it says:
- “Averaged projection mesh”
This method will ignore your lowpoly mesh normals, meaning if you have hard edges/smoothing or any sort of custom edited normals on your lowpoly the “bake” mesh will average everything. The biggest advantage here is that you can use hard edges without any seams or negative artifacts.- “Explicit mesh normals”
This method uses the lowpoly mesh normals directly for your projection direction. What this means is if you have hard edges or smoothing group splits on your lowpoly your “bake mesh” will also have those splits, and you will get gaps in your bake in those areas.It makes me wonder why anyone would bake with out using averaged unless they're blending between the two due to skewing.
This was another post: https://polycount.com/discussion/177780/difference-between-substance-painters-average-normals-baking-and-a-traditional-cage-workflow
which references the same grenade video and workflow by Tim Bergholz who uses the explicit mesh normals - non averaged by default, but the seams from the gaps are not as noticeable because he uses higher res maps with AA.
I'm understanding a lot more now, but questioning why someone like Tim would only use non averaged as a workflow and why the option is there if it isn't really used other than maybe to blend the result.
Thank you