That is a hard no. Wtf Make sure your lowpoly matches your highpoly shapes, be aware what normalmaps can and can not handle and use a cage or proper ray distances for baking. No need to fuck up your highpoly for baking.
I missread the OP. :# I think he meant inflating low poly. It's what I meant. Doing it to Hipoly is indeed weird. Inflating low poly along vertex normals to bake world space normal map on the other hand is where low poly itself become the cage . That way it works in many renderers that are not supported by regular texture…
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…
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.
Generally, you want the shapes in the high and low poly to match as closely as possible - this means that often the low poly will either be exactly the same size or both slightly bigger and smaller than the high. For something like a cylinder, the low should intersect with the high in a vacillating pattern. Here's an…
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…
Just to be clear. Nobody, ever, needed to inflate a highpoly to match it better to the lowpoly. I have never seen such a stunt in the past 25 years, 20 years of which we are using normalmaps. If you have tools that need such a thing, get better tools. The goal is to capture the highpoly as good as possible in as little…