Hi everybody, I wanted to discuss and ask advice regarding a part of the high to low poly pipeline. My mentor told me that, as a last step before baking the normal map from my high poly to low poly, it is good to inflate/displace the high poly geometry (make it more puffy if you will) to completely cover the low poly…
Inflating your highpoly sounds like maybe a misinterpretation of a technique I know from Heroes of the Storm. Sculpts were given a slight inflate before the maps were baked to create thicker edge highlights. It ah, works a lot better with a dynameshed sculpt than it does with a hardsurface model.
My guess his advice goes to cage model rather than low poly itself. Or it may work when you bake world space normal map to be re-baked into tangent space in a separate pass . Especially when you use some 3d party renderer that is not directly supported in package bake tool. For world space normals the actual shape of low…
Thank you all for your answers! To be honest this gives me more piece of mind because this approach has given me problems with simple models like this one and I cannot even imagine what would do with a more complex mesh that has more details or intricate shapes. With all the info you have given me I would call this…
I don't use hi poly mesh for such things at all. All the edge rounding could be baked by just using rounded corner / bevel shader or whatever your 3dpackage or renderer call it and this tiny "detail" could be just painted in substance painter, 3dcoat , or any texture soft. It's a bit less easy on cylinders crossing each…
Well ... one can very well have "years of experience on treeple A" without having any experience working with others - resulting in odd workflows that would never work in production at a studio. "Hey, we need to rebake this armor set" "Sure thing - just remember to inflate the high just a tiny bit, otherwise it won't look…