So... I've been wondering. When baking hard surfaced models, I can either put UV seams on hard edges, or just bevel those edges instead. (Which will result in more geo). But when I'm dealing with low poly assets, sometimes I just cant afford all those bevels, So I end up with a crazy amount of UV seams, which render my…
Tangent space normal maps like that record the direction the surface points in texture space, not local/object space. What this means is that red will always point towards the right of the texture and green will always point towards the top (or the bottom, depending on whether you use an inverted green channel or not). The…
Is it bad practice to not use hard edges and split uvs for all sharp edges on a hard surface model? For the most part on this model I used split UVs and hard edges, but for the center part (smoother stone in the picture) I had one smoothing group even though there's a hard edge, and the normal makes it look right. The…
Hello! First of all, awesome thread, I've read and re-read a lot of pages from this thread already, but I can't seem to figure out some doubts I really need to clarify using one of my models to really solve them!. So, I'm making a random hard-surface spacecraft engine, and this is how I planned to unwrap it, according to…
not at all! at the end of the day, every process has some positives and some negatives. for example, i would avoid exploded baking at the cost of couple more hours to have a more realistic AO bake. if i have to do couple minutes of manual cleanup, so be it. i want a better end result AO. you mention the brink guns, but i…
If its just a drawer i would just make a box delete the top face and then shell it real quick with a custom front face. If this was a hero prop drawer I probably wouldn't sculpt it unless the front face had some fanciful design on it. Just standard hard surface modeling and would probably include the geo of the joints…
Ty so much for the info. I used to do all my baking using the method A in the first post. Of course, hard surfaces came out fubar. Right now, I'm using the " C: Hard edges at uv seams, "Explicit mesh normals" projection" and my results are much better, but I cannot use the B: Hard edges at uv seams, "Averaged projection…
OK, so I think I'm beginning to see where my confusion is coming from - I'm failing to properly recognise the fact that there are two meshes at work here: the low and the projection... let me go over the facts as I'm beginning to understand them and maybe you can point out if I'm still not quite there: 1. smoothing groups…
Hi - back in the world of Normal baking. I came across this thread whilst researching for a car model. There lots of process here but to break it down - would I ( In Maya ): - For any hard edges on the model make them hard 'Harden edges' option - Split the UV seams on those hard edges ( is this to stop gradients ? ) - For…
I suspect the averaged projection mesh is actually way less commonly used than i thought it was. If you couldnt visualise and easilly manipulate a cage i could totally see it being pretty unintuitive. I guess theres also a lot of cases where people dont get how normals work, particularly averaged vs split ones. I've…