soo....the best way to avoid overlapping normals..

fritz

after becoming really familiar w/the norm process. i am just curious if the best way to dup geo w/norm maps is still the process descrbed by poop. you know the one where you move the dup'ed UV's over off the render window.

Arcanox

I generally model out the entire low poly objects... and then find the elements that I can mirror and just delete those parts of the mesh before the projection.

I'd also like to add that on my highpoly model I leave everything intact because the occluding geometry on the other side is necessary if I'm calculating light maps as well.

Once the projection is complete I collapse the mesh and then just detach and mirror over the geometry that I need mirrored. All of the UV information is baked into the geometry. The great thing about tangent normal maps is that if the UV's are inverted, the normals are calculated inverted as well, so in this case it shows up properly.

MoP

Arcanox: However, if you delete parts of the low-poly mesh, your smoothing might change (ie. along the centre line if you're mirroring geometry), so in order to preserve the low-poly normals, you should really just move off the duplicated segment's UVs out of the 0-1 range.

sprunghunt

but if you move your UV's outside the 0-1 range some normalmap processing applications will crash.

So use whatever works for you