the moa problrm with this technque is that when you collpase all the modfiers, the uv's get messed up and it leaves behind a lot of untidinessThen you end up messing aorund with the normals twice to get the desired smoothness using a weighted normals modifier
Its basically just a checker texture , which you apply to the model to check for distortion. since the squares are all pretty even and the distortion is minimal , then its okThere are different kind of uv patterns you can get, some have numbers as well
the problem is though that will take a lot of extra time and the meshes are meant to be viewed from mid distance, so if I had the time and money and I would include interiors( even a basic one) and give them a lot more detail overall but I am bit pushed right now, so they will have to do as I just have to get something out…
getting around the problem with adding panels to low poly meshes using edge split, soldify and bevel. So of course this technique is non destructive. lots of tutorials on this on You Tube
learning a lot about editing normals. After collapsing my bevels and realising that there is a lot of tidying up to do, the shading can easily get messed up blender has a fair few tools to help with that, like smooth vector, reset vector etc you can really fine tune the normals using modifiers and vertex groups to isolate…
so i figured out a similar method where i used the weighted normal techiniques, but combine it with subd level 1. works quite well and is slightly less time consuming than trying to make the low poly look smooth. I will post some WIP on that when get time, but its a promising workflow (for me anyway)