Baking Normal Maps Using Bevel Shader?

Bozurk

Hello, I wanted to ask about the "Bevel Shader" in Blender which is being used by a quite a few game artists to generate the normal maps for the low poly asset. And I find it quite a "Niche" way to bake the asset. How often is it used in the industry? And is it a better choice for creating the normal maps from the high poly due to It's nature of not relying on any Bevels or Support Loops or Dynamesh?

gnoop

Well, I use it regularly . It's just possible to do more or less  same style  rounding corners  in Substance designer /painter too , on simple boxy style things at least,  so often I do it straight in Designer.  Regular baking from hires requires just too much extra time and headache if what you merely want is just the rounding.  Btw  free Octane for Blender does it too, as well as Arnold .  

You just need to understand there is a few limitations/special cases   when you might prefer actual hi res baking.       If you want  perfectly looking dents  across those rounded  edges  .   Although I saw  someone  did  sbsar  for that too  I never managed to do it myself , never without seam still   revealing itself  too much ,  so I do baking  when  I want big dents  like on concrete blocks  for example .

Bozurk

gnoop said:

Well, I use it regularly . It's just possible to do more or less  same style  rounding corners  in Substance designer /painter too , on simple boxy style things at least,  so often I do it straight in Designer.  Regular baking from hires requires just too much extra time and headache if what you merely want is just the rounding.  Btw  free Octane for Blender does it too, as well as Arnold .  

You just need to understand there is a few limitations/special cases   when you might prefer actual hi res baking.       If you want  perfectly looking dents  across those rounded  edges  .   Although I saw  someone  did  sbsar  for that too  I never managed to do it myself , never without seam still   revealing itself  too much ,  so I do baking  when  I want big dents  like on concrete blocks  for example .

Thank you for the educated insight gnoop! I think I prefer the old school way of baking the high poly onto the low poly and that is Dynamesh in most situations and for smaller pieces either destructive beveling/chamfer or using support loops and use subdivsion surface. But as you mentioned "It all depends on the situation" and sometimes, those can be "special cases".

Shrike

There are many workflows,  you need to decide if you value "good enough" and iteration speed more than maximum quality, its always a balance.
Maybe you get better results if you do fast bakes and spend more time on modeling and texturing. Maybe you get better results if you do perfekt bakes. Maybe you need 10x more assets than the other guy, maybe you need 10x less. So you need to pick a workflow that fits what you are trying to do.
Bevel shader is viable. (just make sure that you dont use the same bevel width for all edges that will not look great) 
Its also viable to go lowpoly only as example, so anything goes, depends on what you want and need.

sacboi

Been testing Plasticity for game dev HS asset creation minus High-flow bakes, just making do with a low res base mesh in order too output rounded edges at material level so picked up a few tips for variable radius bevels by using the Zen BBQ addon.