In a realistic case, you would just model a low profile floater that bakes the same info into the normal map. You wouldn't use the whole nut and bolt model shown here ... it's way overkill.
Im not sure if this was mentioned, but does anyone use surface normal bake for floaters and then Geo normal bake for bevels? Its been working good for me. After baking both I mask paint the surface Normal over the Geo Normal bake . the process takes longer but the results are great
Thanks for your reply. I'm not sure that this is the case (in 3ds Max at least). The cube in the bottom-left of my image was baked with hard edges but without supporting geometry. You can clearly see the high-poly floaters being skewed. The reason for this is that the cage still has averaged normals I believe.
So, if i have set custom projection directions manually via cage tweaking or via script, i have to use that same cage to do the AO bake as well to get the AO to match the normals for geometry with lots of detail? Or do people just bake the AO for the LP with just the LP, no HP? I understand this thread is about avoiding…
Hey Paul, glad to see you chime in. I thought about talking a bit about custom normals as I've used that workflow on previous projects as well. However, I have a number of reservations about editing normals as a sort of general use practice. For instance: 1. Both your exporter and game engine/importer need to support…