I am wanting to finally start working with Normal Maps and I guess at the same time learn a little about modeling for games. I am going to start with something easy so I am going for the World War 2 German Potato Masher. I have my high-poly and low poly ready and I am hoping to get a few pointers for what I have done so far and maybe even for further steps.
The bolts around the bottom of the main grenade (HighPoly) are free floating meshes but part of the same Object as the main body, Is this something that works or is that going to give me problems.
What is the best export for Xnormal? I hear .obj is the best export sometimes but that doesn’t mean it’s best for Xnormal in general.
Any tips and tricks in Xnormal, or maybe a tutorial I should really watch would be nice as well.
As for my low Polly mesh, It is made up of 358 quads and no tris, so unless my math is bad it should have 716 triangles when converted. I can drop this more if I remove some bevels that I used to prevent sharp outer edges. Is that to high of a poly count? Should I worry about super sharp edges in low poly meshes?
Don’t worry about the polycount there. It is extremely small and wouldn’t do much to lag up the game engines these days (for example, my handgun models are approx 2000-3000 tris and they run fine).
One thing I should note is that I had trouble with Blender’s smoothing when I baked my first few normal maps. You could see the plainly obvious smoothing errors all over the low poly mesh which didn’t help it much :D. So I had to learn how to make smoothing groups and it fixed all those problems. If you do run into smoothing problems I can easily help you remove them.
As long as you are baking the normal map in xNormal, the free floating geometry will just be baked on. If oyu bake it in Blender, I don’t know if it will like it. I know I tried to use floating geometry not too long ago and it didn’t work like it was supposed to so I assume it still doesn’t work but I dunno for sure.
For smoothing groups, I just used “Mark Sharp” and an Edge split modifier. The other way to do it is to split, like you said, but I dislike that method as its just too messy for my usage. Although I’m not sure if the smoothing will still be intact when exporting from Blender so I just used the internal bake mode instead of worrying about that.
You could always bake it out now without fixed smoothing, and then see how bad it is and if you want to do away with it you can or you can just keep going with whatever you want.
To fix the issue with your bolts, flip that part of the UV map. You should check to make sure that the UV map is not inverted as this would make the normal map also inverted and makes outward bumps seem inward.
The screwthread seems to be between the explosive bit and the bit with the bolts. You probably mixed up some UVs or something. I don’t know, I’m no good at UV’s either.
