Question: Lowpoly + Painted Texture > Optimal smoothing group

SimonT

Hi, i'll try to texture a turtle in WoW style and asked myself how i should do the shading.

To avoid hard edges i would just add 1 sg to all. I tested it with a stone. I think the shading (1 sg to all faces) look bad on any stone. Besides that we have a shot from Diablo and i ask myself - how the achieve #2? #1 is clear - without anti aliasing they would have a hard edge there - but #2 looks detailed and smooth but without bad shading on the flat faces. Here is the diablo screen in fullsize: http://www.cinemablend.com/images/gallery/s22607/diablo_III_12650554582778.jpg

elementrix

I'm not exactly 100% sure what your asking, but 2 is obviously just a cube (without extra edgeloops) with hard edges, which would be something like separate smoothing groups for each face in 3dsmax (never used it though)

Also when painting textures like this, it's usually best to just turn off all lighting/make the texture 100% self illuminating, makes it way easier to see what your doing as you painting the light in the texture and you don't want any light from your app interfering.

bugo

some of those edges they are handling with alpha. They did a cool idea of using alpha for the outline corners. Not sure how they solve that tho. Perhaps the player never rotate the camera? The 2nd DOES have a hard edge, it's just antialiasing of the screenshot that makes it smooth.

SimonT

The point is, when i would make one smoothing group for every face, you get really hard edges. I think the better way is to hide them via 1 sg for all and paint "chamfered" edges o that it looks like more polys it already has.

SimonT

bugo wrote: »

some of those edges they are handling with alpha. They did a cool idea of using alpha for the outline corners. Not sure how they solve that tho. Perhaps the player never rotate the camera? The 2nd DOES have a hard edge, it's just antialiasing of the screenshot that makes it smooth.

Yep, thats the point. The second is not a problem but the first... it looks so awesome.