Sculpting welding on big parts. What is best practice? [Blender]

AlexandrL

Hello guys

Let say we have 2 long metal beams and want to "connect" them and add some wilding details with sculpting. 
Pretty obvious - boolean union, dynamesh/remesh when sculpt. 
But the problem is what our actual weld sculpt will cover something like 1-5% of model surface, so we will waste tons of polygons on long surfaces.

I make some experiment with cutting out just a part or geometry, remesh it, sculpt and when shrinkwrap + normal transfer, but unfortunately it still creating shading artifacts on the gap.
Also a quick test of baking in marmoset show some problems where geometry underlying the "sculpted geometry patch" creating artifacts.

Maybe there's some tricks to make it in more optimized manner?

gnoop

I do it this way usually, painting  a bit of bumps only on connecting beam.

You can also  do it without normal editing and extra loop  by baking bevel shader in Cycles to round corners. But it looks less good in our engine.   I  assume could be totally fine in Unreal .

Eric Chadwick

Trim texture, on a strip at the end of one of the pipes like gnoop says, with edited vertex normals to soften the end.

AdalBertZ

In this article the author was able to get some extra detail over the baking with the bevel shader. Maybe you just need that extra pass on a program like Painter or 3dCoat

https://80.lv/articles/highway-scene-using-blender-for-modeling-and-vegetation-workflow/