normal maps

by the way you may ask what the problem is by looking at the main picture but its actually fucked up for most of the mesh

>>511284
I'm not sure what you're asking. Is it baking tutorials/pipelines, an introduction to normal maps, ...?

no im asking if i should be baking high poly to low poly normal maps for beveled edges. for example a door that has all details modeled instead of being a normal map (those innter squares that intrude and extude out) still have a high poly bake for the edges of the door. this could count for any model with hard edges like that but im using this example

I don't exactly know what's the question here, but I have been using the same normal map on every edge for multible different objects to get beveled edges for better highlights in games to save me time baking everything individually and saving on textures, similar to how this is done:

http://polycount.com/discussion/89682/an-exercise-in-modular-textures-scifi-lab-udk

ok thanks man you mind me telling how you do it your way? im going to read this but it would be nice to hear how you do it

sounds like a godsend to be able to do that. i always get really bad artifacts when trying to bake bevels onto edges and such

>>511297

You make a general purpose normal map with different kinds of edges and surfaces you are going to be needing and then UV unwrap your models so the edges of the UV are aligned with the edges and then a second UV map for detail and diffuse and stuff, so two UV maps. You should be able to make two UV maps in blender but I don't how exactly.

ok thanks didnt know you can do that. honestly though im not really sure how to do general purpose normal maps though. i always just bake one object to another when making my own normal maps. got any links that talk about it more othe then the one you sent me? if not ill try and figure it out myself

>>511313
honestly you can achieve what you want with moderate post effects, even textures.
i wouldn't go far beyond using normal maps for something that takes 2 seconds to model but you may wanna do smoothing groups

>>511315
ok so i can make edges seem softer with gimp?

also yes but usually with smoothing groups i have to put edge loops around the corners so the entire mesh isnt one big blob looking thing. thats fine to do?