Rock - Why? I like to know the nuts and bolts rather than just take someone's word for it.
Be careful with that though because in my testing from above on a 24 cylinder the small triangles on the edges caused some issues with soft normals. My 24 sided cylinder with softened normals got these shading artifacts along the sides of the cylinder. However if you make the caps of the cylinder hard and the body soft, this issue goes away. I am guessing a cylinder with less sides wont have this issue, but I didn't check.
not really normal map related, but you might want to get used to tri stripping
just a minor performance optimization thing
Actually that's not the best way to triangulate a cap. The best way is to do what re-triangulation algorithms do (3ds Max does it perfectly at least) and make the triangles take up the maximum area possible.
I wish I would have seen this from the start but I haven't been on here for months really. This my weakest area right now. I can model pretty good HP stuff, but the LP matching up and normal baking always gets me. I can't seem to get it. My normal bakes in Max always suck too. I should just do this same thing on my spare time. I am currently working on a z-brush character for school so I will have to be normal baking anyhow, but this is good stuff to learn for me soon. Good project!
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Be careful with that though because in my testing from above on a 24 cylinder the small triangles on the edges caused some issues with soft normals. My 24 sided cylinder with softened normals got these shading artifacts along the sides of the cylinder. However if you make the caps of the cylinder hard and the body soft, this issue goes away. I am guessing a cylinder with less sides wont have this issue, but I didn't check.
Basically like this:
Here's a great article on it:
http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=News&ID=228