I don't have time to respond to your entire post right now but just wanted to say, you realize that weapons, vehicles and props are all hard surface work right? Robots, characters with armor and props, etc also have a lot of hard surface elements to them as well. If you do 90% soft organic characters that is one thing, but…
Using custom weighted normals can reduce compression artifacts and help keep highly reflective surfaces looking super clean. It's not necessary for most assets, but can be worth it for certain situations.
Awesome read, EQ. Thanks for sharing, I learnt a great deal. I've basically been using soft edges all over the mesh and surface normals for baking, which usually results in a good bake but has its obvious drawbacks like you mentioned here. I'll start using hard edges more often now that I know the technical workings behind…
I think most of things pipelineIO intended to do is now covered by modo801 version. Store all your surface info in the vertex map, click export selected and here you go :)
^ Yes, depending on your pipeline you might have to break more shells for a cleanly baked angular hard-surface model, but breaking smoothing along your EXISTING shells is already beneficial, no matter what type of model.
Thanks so much for this info. I'll keep on going with my current workflow then:) Sounds like its gonna be easier to do max projection bakes and if the quality isn't better in xnormal I'll skip it for hard surface stuff. Thanks again.
I remember having issues with Crysis 2's tangent basis, although perhaps the latest CE3 SDK is synced with the qualified Max normals, thanks for the info Racer445. Either way, if the xNormal plugin works with the latest version, I think i'll have to try that out. I've been avoiding xNormal, perhaps it's time to start using…
Hello everyone. I'm writing a document for my team about best practices for baking normal maps. There are a couple of things I'm still not sure about, I thought I would ask here and see what people think. I've read the wiki and a lot of this thread, but still the answers to these two questions escape me! Here goes: 1) I…