Hey guys, real quick and easy question. When baking out normals, are you suppose to have no smoothing groups, organized smoothing groups or everything set on 1 smoothing group? My teacher told me no smoothing groups at all but when i bake it out it looks like shit and im basically loosing all smoothness from my highpoly.…
For the most part you are going to want to have your smoothing group splits match your UV splits. This also means that you're going to want to pay attention to how you split your UVs so that your smoothing groups are not going to cause issues. So on a cube, I would unwrap it like a baseball as opposed to an unfolded cross.
You can bake with zero smoothing groups but there isn't much point really. You need the baker to match the tangent basis of the renderer perfectly and it can cause problems when the normal map gets mipped. As such unless you are using object space normal maps I wouldn't generally recommend this. As Xenobond said it's best…