All UV border edges = split vertex tangents along the border. Not vertex normals. They are different things. However since a vertex can only have one set of information, it must split the vertex, even if the normals for both vertices are identical - if the tangent is different, you need a new vertex.
Not necessarily. :shifty: When switching a UV border to a different mesh edge, even if the vertex normals are exactly the same, like in the middle of a planar surface, the tangents could still be very different. Two of the tangent axes are derived directly from the U and V axes, not from the vertex normal (which creates…
Okay, I took some more time to think about this and I have attempted to formulate what I'm not understanding: I understand that anytime you break your UVs your doubling the vertices along the resulting UV border edge so you can hold the two UV coordinates. I also understand that the tangents are derived, in part, from the…
Posting a lot of normal map questions today. I'm doing some documentation and need to figure some of this stuff out. This was taken from this site: http://ddnetworkofartists.net/index.php?itemid=34&catid=7 I'm really confused by what they mean when they say "the software breaks the tangency between one side of the vertex…
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain that Mop. That's one of the clearer explanations I have come across. I think this makes sense now. Normally changing the UVs and thus changing the tangents isn't an issue because the baker takes this change into account and changes the baked data in the normal map to…
Right, sorry, that was a poor explanation. So, at this point im back to not understanding this. Moveing that border edge could result in tangents that are still different. It seams like the article is suggesting that a break in the tangents will reult in the z axis (up axis) of the tangents pointing in a different…
Right, I was able to test this in xnormal and was able to see the tangents. So when you split your UV border edges you get two new verts but still retain a single vertex normal that is shared between those two verts? Or do you get two verts and two vertex normals, and the vertex normals just happen to have the exact same…