re: small areas marked in blue, because these are just slightly inset, the AO is pretty weak here, but the inset cylinder goes way back, and settles on a dark gray color. IMO: these should have some nice fat bevels too for better readability
Thanks! If I do a beveled inset shape for the holes in the rail module how will they be see through once baked in? Playing with the alpha channels on that part when texturing? I am still very new to UVW unwrapping, creating the LP, baking, and texturing.
this is how I do bent floaters, I bend the "matching" geo, by hand generally, but leave the inset geo alone, otherwise it gets warped. (the top one is the good one, bottom two are showing "bad" methods). PS: I bend, then add supporting loops after.
The problem here is that you have un-even geometry, to do this, you need an evenly spaced grid. This isn't perfect and still results in some slightttt smoothing issues, but shouldn't be noticable when baked down. Important thing is A. enough geometry, B. Even grid, C. How insets flow with grid.
Good progress, one thing you need to keep in mind if you're baking this to low is: you'll need to have matching geometry for all of the cutouts you're making in your low(except the ones around the silencer, those will be ok) if you have holes in your high and flat planes in your low, you're going to get bake errors. Its…