Reading EQs thread here about hard edges has gotten me thinking I have over over analyzed it all. I thought the new method was every single uv island, even ones from the same soft normal area (i.e. seam on cylinder side) required a hardened edge. Though you can do this at no cost and only benefit for all models, with…
The benefit also of having one smoothing group (A) is that you can weld your verts a lot more, you can do quicker unwraps with roadkill and pelting on your hard surface objects, and as a result of the bigger UV islands, you have a lower vert count in the engine ( UV breaks = more verts ) would the subtle difference you get…
I probably wouldn't model something like that personally, it is just the most extreme example I could think off to put context to my question. Say if I am using synced normals such as xnormal to UDK, and needed a model like that for whatever reason. If I set my one hard edge to where the green meets the purple it should be…
It is perfectly fine to use tris for low poly models. In fact every mesh in game engines is triangulated anyway. I don't know about maya but in max there is even an option to show a hidden edge that splits the quad into two triangles. In your case, there is a hidden edge that runs from the lover vertex that I marked "X"…
Thanks for the reply. I'm still going to have to disagree with you on these points.The only time you should ever get seams with mirrored objects is if you have made an error with the geo (as Farfarer said), the baker and renderer aren't synced or the sign isn't stored. With a perfectly synced workflow you should be able to…
Can you post images of your problem? If so, start a new thread and post them there. If not: A bit of stretching is preferable over a million seperate pieces, in my opinion. It depends on what the texture will look like, but since in a lot of cases the texture of a hard-surface model will contain straight lines, I…
Lot of great discussions in this thread! I agree that the OP can be structured a bit more. Maybe leave all the basic terminology to a different post, or point to the Wiki where the info on it is, and highlight the pros and cons a bit more. Don't know if it has been linked to, but here is unreals page showing a flawless,…
Sure, you don't need to have hard edges on all UV seams but it still makes sense to add them because it's free and it makes a less colourful normal map which helps with a) texture compression, b) workflows where the engine and baker are not 100% synced and c) situations where texture resolution isn't great enough to…
Like, look at the mesh in lighting only mode in UDK. If you see weird smoothing artifacts running across it, the normal map will have a gradient in it to try and remove that artifact. Basically the more smoothing artifacts you have, the harder the normal map has to work to compensate and make the surface appear smooth.…
There's actually a few reasons not to do that. With mirrored meshes where you have 2 island representing the mirrored surface it may not be a good idea to split these two island to different smoothing groups, especially if your mesh isn't a flat plane. Also, it's not a very good idea to make hard edges on a cylindrical or…