normal map a wire

lloyd

Heres something I'm working on

it's a HP and i am currently adding wires to it. however I'm not sure about normal mapping wires. in the top left of the picture you can see a fairly thick wire/pipe that will be normal mapped. but i then have some smaller wires.

Here you can see one in blue.
I'm not sure if i want it like it is on the left, a wide rectangular shape wire [like a sata cable]. or like it is on the right, a round wire. but with it being small-ish I'm not sure how / if i should normal map it?

i was thinking of leaving it but then i thought about laying the uv's all on top of the same 20x20 pixel section on the uv which has the normal information on it. so that stretches along the wire. in that case there's probably no need to make it on the hp [apart from a hp render]

so that's what I'm asking. I've looked for information on normal mapping wires but i can't seem to find any, what have you done in the past about wires?


Thanks polycount

-lloyd

Will Faucher

I've never been in a situation where I needed to normal map wires like that, but I would assume the process is no different than normal mapping anything else. You could always try just using the low poly's normals alone, depending on how small it is on your model.

MattLichy

Id prob. not even normal map them. Or use a tiling texture to apply along them. Trying to rip normals from a HP to those prob. wont turn out all that good/help that much.

Those wires are more about silhouette it seems anyways.