Baking High-Poly bike to Low-Poly bike. How to do this in a neat way?

Support Modeling
1

Dear Blenderusers,

http://th03.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2012/358/6/b/children_bicycle_by_ristridyn-d5ozj61.pngYesterday I moddeled this Little bike as an high-poly model.
Now I want to create a low-poly assets of this bike to use it in a game.
I know how to use Xnormals to bake out all the geometry, but I’ve got a few practical questions.
The parts that would need geometry baked to it are the tires, pedals, horn and the saddels, I think the other parts of the bike might be a waste of uv-space to bake normals too… I mean all those long cylinderlike shapes… wouldn’t smooth shading do the trick for that geometry? What kind of uv-layout would you recommend for this asset?
Normally I would unwrap it all since I would have to bake the defuse, spec and such but since all the metal is done with a shader wouldn’t that be unnecessary? I could really use some advice on this. How would you make this asset Game-ready?

Cheers,

Ristridyn.

2

Separate your high poly meshes first. Unwrap them , adjust them on single uv layout. For rest of the model, unwrap them and weld all the points. this way you’ll have unwrapped mesh, but without uv space wastage.

By the way, it’s a good idea to unwrap all the model, give little bit space to cylinder type stuff and bake AO map for it. It helps in give a realistic look.

3

Thank you, Just the advice I needed.