no, do not scale your low to cover floaters, you want your low to match the base shape of your high, you use the cage/ray distance to "catch the floaters".
ya good rule of thumb for highpolys divide shit where it is separate in real-life, with the exception of floaters for making surface detail. But in this day the need for floaters as pretty much been nullified by tools like nD2.
Here's a question for you. On the face of the buildings are those floaters? (the windows doors molding etc) And 2nd..... not to thread jack, but what are the pros and cons of having floaters in the game engine vs a continuous mesh?
A tip for floaters: Flare the bottom open edge out along the same plane as the object under it. This will give your floater a nice smooth transition and make it look like it is connected and one solid piece.
As far as the wing goes, there are no floaters there, it's all modeled, but the tight, small mechanical detail are psuedo-floaters of sorts - basically all the kitbash models I have from the first image crammed and arranged in various ways.
If it's for a game then you don't need to model it. You can either bake floaters or add it as bump/normal detail in a Substance Painter layer(that is, if you use it) For the floater just model a single element and clone/array the pattern.
@thevilbrain As a work around for now those decals can be individually modeled as floaters that sit just above your geometry. All of those shapes are fairly straight forward to create on their own. Those floaters would in fact bake down in Marmoset
Okay so are those floaters, or are they a part of the original mesh? It only makes sense to me that they are floaters; I don't understand how you would be able to map a piece so that you could non destructively place decals like that on assets.
Started to model this concept here ignusdei's railpistol and heavily experimented with floaters. Found a nifty little trick to align floaters to organic surfaces in blender, too :O e:// I am also aware of the fact that "that" edge in the front is too tight.
Hmm, I don't get it, what errors does this solve? Supersampling gives antialiasing around the edges of floaters, but it doesn't fix the problem where floaters don't cast good AO because they're too far away. I thought EQ had a nice workaround for this.