Bevelling, Smoothing & Edge Padding with Normal Mapping?
polycounter lvl 11
I'll just cut to the chase: I read that one can bevel 90° edges to make them smoother when normal mapping. I also smoothed the map, yet this was the result (which was slightly worse):
That was done on a 1024 * 1024 map. Different values for edge padding appear to do nothing, so my questions are threefold:
1. How much should you bevel edges / is it worth it?
2. How great an extent should the smoothing groups be used?
3. How do edge padding?
Many thanks for any answers given.
Addendum: I also tried to keep the projection mesh as tight as possible, if that makes any difference.
That was done on a 1024 * 1024 map. Different values for edge padding appear to do nothing, so my questions are threefold:
1. How much should you bevel edges / is it worth it?
2. How great an extent should the smoothing groups be used?
3. How do edge padding?
Many thanks for any answers given.
Addendum: I also tried to keep the projection mesh as tight as possible, if that makes any difference.
Replies
the problem you're seeing here is not because of the bevel. It looks like a problem with your lowpoly UVs or smoothing groups. I bevel edges all the time and do not get this problem.
Smoothing groups increase your vertex count dramatically and can waste memory. You should use them very sparingly.
My working method is to apply smoothing groups where there are separate UV islands. Then to do a normalmap bake with one smoothing group applied. And then put in an extra smoothing group where I think it's required.
This is usually done automatically by the baking software? You can usually never have too much edge padding.
It's probably an issue with my UV map. I hate doing them without experimenting with high-poly modelling. So, where should I make the seam for the edges? Without bevelling (ie. 90° angle) it'd be clear where to make the seam, but to me it looks like the bevelled edge could belong to either.
Also, regarding edge padding, how does it actually work? I mean, I know that it repeats the border pixels along the seams, but I don't see how it works in a map, as they honestly are making nary a difference despite my changes.
In addition to the padding feature in your baker, you want to make sure you have a good amount of space between each UV island, say 16 pixels worth on a 2048K, 8 pixels on a 1024K, etc. I usually set the "padding" in the baker to 64 pixels, really you can't ever have "too much".
I'm not entirely clear on what you're asking about bevels etc. Can you zoom out on your model, show some wires, show the highpoly, show the uvs, etc etc?
Your screenshot above looks like random verts or uvs are unwelded.
There's the picture with wireframe added. I checked, and there are no errant unwelded verts to be found.
Its still lacking any context though, is this a small part of the asset? What does the high look like? How big is it? These are all questions that go into "should I bevel it or not".
sorry, I turned off the smoothing while I was tinkering about with the vertexes. Here's it smoothed.
The part will be focused on, which is why I did the bevel. At the moment the big questions I'm finding are "why is the normal map really disjointed" and "why hasn't the bevelling helped".
Update:
Okay, so it seems that it was just a case of poor UVing, and now the normal maps look much more sexy and smooth, but it still doesn't stop there from being visible seams between edges. What is the best way of reducing those?
Also, thank you very much Stug & Eearthquak for helping