Hard Surface Modeling and UVW Mapping

[Anonymous]

How do you guy unwrap low poly Model which your gonna later Bake from turbo smoothed Mesh. I heard you need to have seams on every hard edge part of the model but it creates a lot of seams in the model and makes textures look bad on hard edge parts of the model.

[dominique.bouthillette]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thanks for your post here!

From my experience you don't need to have a seam for every (or even every other) hard surface edge on a model. I was always instructed to hide and minimize seams as best as you can. For example, if you were modeling a person you'd want to stay away from creating a blatant seam on the front of their shirt (unless it had a zipper or something).

For this, I think you can keep some of the hard edge seams but get rid of others, essentially making larger UV islands in the Editor for the unwrap. Although hard edges can be defined through UV seam usage, you can also use smoothing groups and the like to capture those creases.  =P

I hope this helps a little!