Yes, if you want your edges to be more round or to have thicker bevels for readability or style, this should simply be a part of how the high poly meshes are constructed, not a step you add at the end of the process.
If you want your edges to be smoother, make em smoother in the high poly phase. This is an art direction, maybe tech art decision to be made early on and then everyone can follow this ruleset for consistent bakes/textures.
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.
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…
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…
Hi @EarthQuake. I completely understand and agree with the points both you and @Neox are saying but you made a good point explaining the "shrinkage" that happens when subdividing a mesh, the low poly ends up being slightly larger, etc. I understand that if we want to make the edges of the model rounder we can do that in…
Knowing that this may have originated from HoTS gives the needed context IMHO - and I think this perfectly illustrates how something that may be relevant for a very specifc (and somewhat hacky) edge case is not to be taken as gospel, and can end up costing time and ressources. I personally didn't take part in the…
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…