Is it cake? One of these has an actual mesh (I think on the right here), while the other is in truth a solid cylinder with a texture. The better results were from creating the texture myself, rather than baking it on. It doesn't look quite as good in the #VR scene in #unity3d as in #blender3d: the lighting doesn't work quite the same way, and you can tell it's a texture when you stand close-up. But it's also over a factor of 100 less polygons, which is needed for a big room design.
@elizabethtasker
Nice! And yep, ever so slightly cheaper to render...
Re: baking stuff - I'll often put together normal maps etc. in Substance Designer or Substance Painter rather than bake them from a highpoly thing - it can be a lot more controllable and adjustable that way. Plus quicker.
@elizabethtasker
Baking normals from highpoly stuff is an art in itself!
Your earlier image - I think it's interpolating the view direction for baking around the ends of the cylinder, hence the weird stretching. Substance Painter does this by default ('Average normals', or something) - no idea about Blender. One workaround is to add edge-loops quite close to the top and bottom of the cylinder, so the normal interpolation happens over a short distance. Or, detach the cylinder ends...
@coprolite9000 Hmm, interesting. I did do a "cage bake" where the "cage" is actually just a slightly enlarged version of the low-poly model. I would have thought that would help avoid artefacts like that, but I may be completely wrong! Ultimately, just drawing onto the UV map and importing as an image worked well, but only because the UV map was super simple 😅
@elizabethtasker
You'd probably want the cage to be only slightly taller than the underlying cylinder, while a fair bit wider - imagine the view direction rays coming in radially and horizontally for the curved part of the cylinder, rather than increasingly from above or below at the top and bottom...
(I rarely use any manual cage stuff, letting Substance Painter or whatever do that automatically. Then there's the fun of dividing meshes into sections, so stuff doesn't get in the way...)
@elizabethtasker
Normal maps: an utter pain, but so very important. Random tips:
Have each UV island as a separate vertex smoothing group (or similar) - avoid hard vertex normal creases inside a UV island, as you get a discontinuity if the normal map tries smoothing around it.
Normal maps aren't great at creating sharp edges. Good place for a new UV island!
Triangulate meshes before baking - software has different opinions on how this should be done, and you need to be consistent.
OpenGL or DirectX? Stuff will look weird if this is wrong. (It's down to different opinions on the green channel - you can fix things by inverting it in Photoshop...)
MikkTSpace or something else? Oh no. (Blender is very much the former? Really only matters if you're pushing normal maps particularly hard...)
Did I mention that they're an absolute pain? Yep. Good luck!
(I can definitely recommend something like Substance Painter or Marmoset Toolbag if you get too deep.)
@coprolite9000 I admit.... I've (almost) so far used the automatic blender tools for UV unwrap! But I sense I may be reaching my limit with that and will have to embrace drawing my own seams! But it seems so damn fiddly....
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