0
$\begingroup$

I've been taking apart game assets to study them and there are a few things, I cant figure out how it was done.

I have this wood plank hereenter image description here

UV mapping for the plank. enter image description here

to my understanding, there should be a seam for every hard edge. While here it looks like they only split the bottom off and placed seams on the corners. Leaving the top and sides as One island. enter image description here

This is nice because you only have 2 islands instead of 6, but i can't figure out how they did this without getting seams in the bake.

The plank also has some strange smoothing going on, so i checked the normal directions. Which just looks like an object shaded smooth without 'auto smooth'. enter image description here

Normal map view enter image description here

The final result comes out seamless.enter image description here

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
4
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ The basic answer is, you bake normals from a flat shaded object to a smooth shaded object. The edges of the low poly are not actually hard edges. They look like smooth normals because they are smooth normals. The reason to seam hard edges is to prevent mipmapping from blurring that hard edge, but in your example, they weren't concerned about that (and generally, most people shouldn't be; advice to seam hard edge is appropriate in very few situations-- a sword edge would be a good case, but yes, it would end up with a seam in the actual image; a board would not be a good case.) $\endgroup$
    – Nathan
    Feb 18, 2023 at 22:35
  • $\begingroup$ Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, does this mean that the "high poly" was flat shaded? Wouldn't that cause a faceted look on the smooth shaded low poly? $\endgroup$
    – bonypoy
    Feb 18, 2023 at 22:46
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ It could be! On a mesh with planar faces, that's fine. Or, it could have only some edges marked as sharp. It could even be autosmooth. The bake will read the actual normals of the high poly's faces. If sharp edges, flat shading, or autosmooth changes those normals, that's fine; the low poly will read those custom normals and use them to determine its own bake values. $\endgroup$
    – Nathan
    Feb 18, 2023 at 22:49
  • $\begingroup$ Awesome thank you so much for your input! $\endgroup$
    – bonypoy
    Feb 18, 2023 at 23:02

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.