Every UV border in UV space that isn't already a hard edge in 3d space costs extra verts. Adding a single bevel costs exactly the same adding a hard edge too, so you can either have bevels or a hard edge for the same cost. In addition you can add hard edges around your UV borders for free anyway so you could actually have…
Great article/read EQ...I was wondering if you could clear up a few things for me??? 1)I think I might have the terminology wrong...are UV splits and UV borders the same thing? 2)Are edges considered hard because its on a 90 degree bend or because the edge is between 2 separate smoothing groups? 3)Is this what you were…
I would, i'm at work and can't send out files. anyway it's just a default maya cube. I used a high res cube with beveled edges as the source and used the default cube as the target. I used the default uv layout and made all edges soft except for the uv borders...I baked a 1024 using geometry normals and this is the…
Very true. Though having a hard edge on the seam of a cylinder will rarely cause problems (esp if your tangent workflow is synced). In fact I rarely bother to make sure that edge is soft after running the script in maya that hardens all uv borders. However, there are some situations where it can be problematic, such as an…
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…
From your response I seriously wonder whether you've taken the time to read what I've written, or if you simply do not understand it. I've explained it all in no uncertain terms but you're still confused about basic issues. Like the uv seams thing you just said, if you would have bothered to read any of this stuff you…
A few questions: Are you using a cage, and are the cage's normals soft (or, in max, are they one smoothing group?) Does the low have hard edges around UV borders? Are you baking your normal map as Y+ or Y-? And are you viewing with the same settings? Does the UV map have splits on edges with ~80 degree or higher corners?…
I have a question regarding UDK and normals. EQ states that you don't NEED to introduce hard edges where you have UV splits. And it totally makes sense. If I have a mesh in Marmoset it works like a charm (I only have separate SGs where the separate UV islands are). But with Unreal I run into a problem: when I import the…
Hey there First of all thanks to Quack!, Joopson and Earthquake so..... i really have been missing the cage. But i didnt actually forget it, but i didnt "activate" it in xNormal. I was assuming that when i opened the 3DViewer and nothing of the low poly sticks through the cage it would be fine. But i was totally wrong, i…