alright hi guys today i will be showing the much requested lesson; baking highpoly normals onto lowpoly meshes,,, what it pretty much boils down to is that u can make a lowpoly mesh look like something highpoly without having a high trianglecount. in this tutorial i'll show you how to do this on a rim but it can be done one anything really just account for the fact that because these are images they'll be restricted by roblox's 1024x1024 image resolution which might force you to split up your mesh into multiple parts or just deal with the fact that it might look pixelated up close. anyways lemme just do this real quick
i'll be performing this on a rim today as i said before which comes in at a way too high for you guy's standards 7946 triangles
this is caused by the fact that i bevel everything cause that's what this is for plus it's cool
so what u pretty much wanna do now is create a copy of this rim and in the copy you want to delete all the bevels which don't contribute to the shape and only to shading, it's still important to have the shading be clean if you'd mark everything with sharp edges because if you'd just not care about the topology at all and just leave ngons everywhere it'll show errors even after you bake it
this is before removing the excess geometry (7946 tris)
this is after (2901 tris)
as u can see it still has the same shape just all the bevels removed.
you don't want to leave any sharp edges in visible places unless those sharps were already there in the highpoly mesh as these will also cause errors in the bake hence my reduced rim looking like a molten turd
the next step is to unwrap ONLY YOUR LOWPOLY RIM DON'T UNWRAP THE HIGHPOLY as it just isn't needed at all
the orange lines on my rims are seams, what i did was have the line between tire and dish be a seam and the line between dish and spokes be a seam also shut the fuck up ankle or i will crush your balls
and i placed a final seam in the tire and dish to turn those into a long straight which i will show in the uv map
this is what my uv map looks like, could be better but hey i suck at uv unwrapping, tire at the very left, next to that is the dish, then it's quite obvious to see the spokes, below that is the center cap which i decided to seperate to make better use of the empty space left in the uv map as this center cap contains quite alot of tiny detail which requires more image resolution
and in the center of the empty space left by the center cap in the spokes i placed my lugs but hey u can do whatever with those (also used seams to seperate those)
to make my tire/dish uv nice and straight i used a blender addon called uv squares which allows you to well, make your uv's straight or turn them into squares and a few other options, you just select the tire/dish in the uv map and hit to grid by square and it'll turn into a nice straight line
note this only works if you have quad topology uv squares doesn't handle triangles well and it'll just fuck over your uvs if you attempt to do so
alright so now that you've prepped your lowpoly rim it's time to export it as your prefered format to substance painter
one last note before you do this, make sure the highpoly and lowpoly rim are in the EXACT same location or the bake won't work and you'll end up with rims
just make sure to not import the highpoly rim aswell as this'll be done differently later and you'll need both of them to be in a seperate file from eachother
once imported to substance you should see your molten ass turd looking rim in the viewport like this
what you want to do next is go to bake mesh maps which is located under texture settings
once u hit bake mesh maps this will pop up, you don't have to bake all of these but i'm just going to anyways cause it makes it suitable for texturing, import your highpoly rim mesh by clicking on the paper icon next to high definition meshes and it'll show up like that
if you've done it all correctly all u have to do now is press bake on the bottom right of the last screenshot and boom
your molten turd rim has now turned into the swag highpoly rim
so yeah uhhh
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/593233696199409664/801893398365732904/bf74add4b0a0bbd668de03db7d7cddb6.png once you're done baking you can texture it like i did and
then tada
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