There's a long explanation for 'why' this is the right way to set up your edges but the short version is it minimizes seams, errors, and gradients that can cause shading problem. Then in your UV editor window go to the UV Toolkit and Select By Type > Texture Borders and then just make those edges hard. The easy way to do this in maya is to select all edges and make them soft (Display > Soft Edges).

The ideal way to set up your edges on your low poly is to have all edges be soft except the borders of your UV islands.

So if your low poly was all hard edges (or all soft edges) during baking then it needs to stay that way for the normal to be accurate. In any case, when you bake a normal map the important thing is that whatever smoothing/hard edges you had on your low poly model when you baked need to be the same when you apply that normal map. If so that can be an indication of a baking error in your normal map. Ideally your normal map would just be describing the skin detail of the bumps but do you see other shading that doesn't quite make sense. As-is, or all as png, jpg or bmp.No problem, it's an honest question! I mean if you were to look at the normal map in an image viewer would it appear to have gradients that appear to be the same shape as your polygons. Now that you know this method, the only limit is your imagination!Įxport all the textures from a model to a directory. Using this method, you can complete the rest of the cockpit. Now when you delete the shapes you just created, you will be left with the shapes “stamped” onto the curved hull.įrom here you can use the paint bucket to colour the windows separately from the rest of the cockpit. Right click on the hull and choose “Intersect face… -> With model”. Now you can further add things like windows, by tracing the line drawings, extruding and moving the shapes so they intersect the shuttle at the correct places. For this, make sure the “Soften coplanar” option is selected Select the whole model again, and open up the Soften Edges dialog again, and smooth the new edge. Once done correctly, you should see this: If you see any of the following on your model, it means that at some point in the process you either scaled incorrectly, or you accidentally changes one half and not the other. When you move the shapes together, the edges to fit perfectly. Right click on the new shape and choose “Flip Along… -> Component’s Red” (or Green depending on how your model is oriented)

Raylectron soften edges