Importing mesh with sharp edges without doubling vertex count

Development Rendering
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Hi everyone,

I’m facing an issue while importing a mesh into Unreal Engine. If I don’t smooth the mesh before importing, the vertex count doubles. However, I would like to import my mesh while preserving sharp edges. Is there a way to do so without increasing the vertex count?

I’m using Blender and I’ve tried using the “Auto Smooth” feature and lowering the angle value to preserve the sharp edges but it didn’t work.

It’s a bit inconvenient as I’m interested in exploring nanites, but from what I have seen, they seem to work only with smoothed meshes.

Any suggestions or solutions would be appreciated!

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You can bake the hard edges of a sharp normal mesh onto a smoothed normal mesh’s normal map in the same way you would bake any high poly mesh details into the normal map of a low poly model. The downside is that the sharpness of edges could be visibly impacted by the normal maps texture resolution.

Nanite “works” on meshes with split/hard normals, but not as effectively. The Nanite tech documents go into detail on this.
“Weighted” normals are another way you can achieve sharper looking edges while still technically being smoothed.