I’ve turned a sweet 3M polygon character into a sweet quad-based character of roughly 70k triangles, aka 35k quads.
It’s Uv-ed, it’s baked, it’s fancy, BUT i haven’t figure out yet how to handle a proper smoothing of the mesh.
I’ve tried in 3dsmax: -> Edit Poly (turning the mesh into triangles)-> Smooth but some light glitch because i lost the quads.
Then i trieds straight ‘NURM interpolation’ which smooth way too much and i lost all the details but the lightning looks great hopefully.
Then i tried some ‘soften edges’ in Maya.
Anyway, i’m not satisfied at all with what i’ve got so far. Making this nice quad-based character took me ages in quad draw, i want the best out of it, not some overly smoothed, faded figure :/.
Any help is welcome, even if it’s merely pointing me into the right direction, i can look for tutorials etc… but obviously i’m missing something here.
Quad draw -> baking -> gives me this result in which i can see the quads when looking closely, so i assume i’m missing some form of smoothing?
It’s hard to tell exactly what all you’re doing, from the photo it looks like you have seams in your normal map, you need to make sure you have some padding around the UV islands where it duplicates the edge pixels a few layers so that seams like that don’t show up. It may also be that your UV’s aren’t laid out well because there’s a lot of seams there that would be unnecessary.
As far as smoothing goes–you have your low poly mesh, the only smoothing you would do would be Smoothing Groups in 3ds Max, where it controls which surfaces would appear to be smoothed together, some other methods like Meshsmooth/Turbosmooth/NURMS will subdivide the mesh which adds more polygons and that’s not what you’re wanting to do.
On Maya try Mesh Display → Set Normal Angle… and set it to 90 degrees;
That gives a natural balance between smooth normals and hard edges of neighbor faces above the relative 90° angle.