Baking and smoothing groups

[David_Sola]

Hello everyone.Hope you all doing well.
Im always curios how game industries choose which asset will be smoothed with smoothing groups and wich will go throught baking process.
If asset is started in zbrush then it will be decimated or retopologized and later baked.
But the question is when they decide which model will be smoothed only with smoothing groups?
Thanks.

[maxthebest685]

As name says Smoothing Groups. You have to use it where you want smooth surface in lowpoly. Like in arch. Facec on arch will be looks flat and angular if you won't give it smoothing group. So you will need to give it smoothing groups so it will look smooth. but for straight and flat thing. There will be no smoothing group required because it is flat . no need to make it looks smooth.

How ever this Threat will help you to understand well.

[EyecyArt]

Maybe he is talking about which objects do live without a normal map and which are only shaded by vertex normals.
If so some information would be great

Curiously I recognized that some AAA games made less use of normalMaps some time ago while indies/amateurs made use of them to much. Personally I worked on a project where I barely used normal maps and rather did some pre baked lighting in the color channel and concentrated on specular maps. This can even give a better result if the normal map's resolution would be to low.

But it depends heavily on the scene and it's lighting conditions. Basically, the less important an object is, the more you can ignore doing a normal or even a specular texture for it.

[David_Sola]

But it depends heavily on the scene and it's lighting conditions. Basically, the less important an object is, the more you can ignore doing a normal or even a specular texture for it.

Thats what I thought.Thanks for sharing information.