Battlefield 3 Vehicle Normal maps

[ninersix]

Just a question for BF3 players who are knowledgeable on the subject, since I have not yet played the game or had the opportunity to inspect the ingame artwork.

Do all driveable vehicles (tanks , apc's) have high resolution normal maps applied ( ie: normal maps created from higher resolution versions of the vehicles) ?
Or are the normal maps missing this hi-res bake detail as they where in BF2?

[Matroskin]

I haven't played it, but I'm pretty much sure there is some 3d bake as probably all vehicle/weapon work is done through 3d bakes today.

Usually if you see the champhered/rounded edges - then it is a good sign of "hi-res" bake.
However, the bake may be done not from entire fully modelled hi-res mesh, but instead it may be a set or layers of partial bakes.

For example, floating geometry for rivets... Vehicles today are pretty much always done using some sort of a bake from another 3d model, but it may not always be one huge bake.

I personally prefer the layered bakes for modern day vehicles as imo it seems to be faster and gives a good flexibility during texturing given their hard-edge design. Having different baked detail in different Photoshop layers allows you to play with them undividually (add layer effects for example).

So if your question is about if you can do the normal map solely from crazybump or NVidia plugin, then you can't, but for some passes (such as dirt or rust) - why not