A handy soft normals trick I learned from the source mapping ppl and also reminded of recently by @kronok.bsky.social who seems to be making an UE mapping addon In blender press Ctrl+Shift+R to make extra edges and RMB>Smooth. Unlike bevel it wont mess up orthogonal geo and its also easier to undo - ThreadSky

passivestar.bsky.social • 9 days ago

A handy soft normals trick I learned from the source mapping ppl and also reminded of recently by @kronok.bsky.social who seems to be making an UE mapping addon

In blender press Ctrl+Shift+R to make extra edges and RMB>Smooth. Unlike bevel it wont mess up orthogonal geo and its also easier to undo

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pughausen.bsky.social•9 days ago

I feel both humbled, and inspired by every blender strat you post.

thomaskole.bsky.social•9 days ago

Wait till you hear about _harden normal_

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

An unsmoothed step next to smoothed ones for comparison

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

can confirm that bevel modifier with 2 segments + profile shape 1 + bevel weight + hardened normals works too, even with orthogonal geometry being ngons

there are some geo cases I noticed where it'd still create unwanted polys in those but it's probably avoidable. I'll have to test and see

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

if you use triangulate modifier after doing those hardened bevels make sure to have Keep Normals checked or they'll get fucked up

duckogato.bsky.social•9 days ago

if only i knew that 2 weeks ago...

arosbottom.bsky.social•9 days ago

Interesting. Is the central pillar connected to the steps & floor? Just trying to work out if you're successfully dealing with an ugly n-gon on the side of the pillar where it meets the steps, or if the pillar is totally unconnected?
If pillar is unconnected, do you have to worry about light leaks?

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

everything is connected, I prefer ngons for the ease of modeling. btw connected geometry wont prevent all light leaks, if you have sun or sky light outside you'll still need light blockers. what connected geometry does prevent though is shadow leaks, which is a big problem with godot lightmapper

arosbottom.bsky.social•9 days ago

Cheers for the reply. I guess on totally flat geo that n-gone are fine and the game engine or gltf/fbx exporter from blender will be deciding where the triangles will be anyway.
In my head I’m still thinking about the custom texturing apps we had for games in 90’s that only accepted tris & quads :)

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

Exporters actually dont, they exports ngons. I use triangulate modifier to both preview tris and make sure all of the apps in the pipeline get the exact same triangulation. I don't use ngons for assets, but for level geometry they are a huge timesaver because you can subdivide only what you need

humanharddrive.bsky.social•9 days ago

looks better unsmoothed

fr3nkd.bsky.social•9 days ago

I would say this is essential to make decent game art.

haffisnatten.bsky.social•9 days ago

Wait, he's cooking.. Sure in Blender you could use a bevel modifier or whatever, but for games this is great!

nofoxtugiv.bsky.social•9 days ago

This is where I wish Bluesky had a system where I could save… what are we calling these? Skeets? Posts, where we can save posts to a personal collection for review. Love tricks like these!

tikkaqrow.bsky.social•9 days ago

Gaem ready <3

landervr.bsky.social•9 days ago

You should also be able to just throw a bevel modifier on top, set the profile to 1, and shade smooth on the full mesh. And in the case you get any weird smoothing, hardened normals/a weighted normal modifier would probably fix those. Same thing in the end but less destructive :D

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

mmm, if you shade smooth the whole mesh you'll have to manually unsmooth what needs to stay sharp one way or another.. which is probably most edges in a regular game map? you probably only need to sparingly smooth pillars, stairs, etc, but wall-to-ceiling and wall-to-floor edges are usually sharp

landervr.bsky.social•9 days ago

You could probably use bevel weights and geometry nodes to mark edges that have no bevel weights as sharp automatically. A quick test:

landervr.bsky.social•9 days ago

The only issue I run into with this is when beveling an edge that has continuing edges. But you could throw a planar decimate modifier to turn all flat surfaces into ngons and that should fix that. Probably also fixable in geo nodes by someone who's smarter than me.

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

hm yeah that might be a problem. even though I love my planar ngons there are plenty of situations where you randomly need edges, i.e to assign different surface materials to different parts of the floor/ceiling or even if you need to have a geo split for mesh culling purposes

landervr.bsky.social•9 days ago

The delimit options when using planar decimate are quite powerful. You can prevent material edges, seams, sharp edges from getting yeeted. But it's definitely a tradeoff, and you'd probably have to adjust some parts of your workflow. The ease of use of bevel weight like this seems huge though :D

fr3nkd.bsky.social•9 days ago

I do it like this too! You can also use bevel weight to decide exactly which edges will be affected.

landervr.bsky.social•9 days ago

Also, I haven't really had time to play with Eevee next yet, and damn it's so good 😍

joelobrist.com•9 days ago

📌

hareware.xyz•9 days ago

You can also bake the normals from the Bevel node in Blender's shader editor if adding more geometry isn't feasible.

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

yes but that only applies to assets, not regular level geometry with tiling textures. unless you do tilesheets/hotspotting/etc

hareware.xyz•9 days ago

Couldn't you bake the normal map with the same UVs you use for the lightmap, if you don't want to setup hotspotting?

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

I leave lightmap UV generation to godot because it's less work, but wouldn't baking such a big normal map be wasteful? it's probably better to hotspot in that case

tikkaqrow.bsky.social•9 days ago

When the normal map bake spits out a 400 mb 8k texture and people wonder why their VRC world tanks vram.

Do you have a YT channel with shorts of these little tips? I'd like to sub if you do.

lovebruv.bsky.social•9 days ago

🔖

rockalot.bsky.social•9 days ago

What the actual fuck bro 😳

girlglock.com•9 days ago

someone (not me) should make a blender plugin that saves your project.blend into a project.vmap.txt

vincentaalber.bsky.social•9 days ago

Would you use that rather than a bevel modifier (controlling individual edges' bevels with bevel weight) ? It seems much harder to control the size here, as you only see the result after two steps. Cool idea nonetheless 👀

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

whatever works! for level geometry you'd normally use bevel only if your level consists of modular chunks, although even then youd normally bake bevels into a normal map to save on polys unless the radius is high. Bevel would be hard to fit into my workflow because my level geo here is a single mesh

foxdance.bsky.social•9 days ago

it's such a small thing but it made Half Life Alyx's interiors look really good just having a little bit of smooth shading around the corners of walls

passivestar.bsky.social•9 days ago

I thought alyx did soft corners mostly via bevels baked into hotspot texture sets? I'll need to take another look

tomasweisss.bsky.social•9 days ago

I usually use can the Weighted Normals modifier to achieve the same or similar effect.

sweeterlake.bsky.social•3 days ago

📌

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