Are the vertex normals of imported meshes always smoothed (like Soften Edge in Maya)?

Is it possible to set the vertex normals to unsmoothed (like Harden Edge in Maya), when nomal Maps are extracted.

I’m looking into creating Normal Maps for hard surfaces.

Are the vertex normals of imported meshes always smoothed (like Soften Edge in Maya)?

Currently the normals are all smooth. We don’t display mixed hard-soft normals in this version. We have many request to change this though.

Is this a model you are planing to subdivide in order to create details for the normal map? If not you should consider painting a bump map in Mudbox then use the Nvidia Photoshop plugin to convert that height map into a normal map.

At the moment I first do a few subdivisions without moving vertex positions (to “tighten” the corners) and then some subdivisions with moving vertex postions on.

It seems to work out quite well ; )

The only problem I have right now is that if you have for instance a cube and you add a detail in the corners of the sides, like a round screw thingie. This detail gets all distorted in the normal map. This is because of the vertex smoothing in combination with the raycasting I guess.

I have several solutions to this but they are not all optimal;
- Add more (unsmoothed) subdivisions to the low poly geometry, but this adds more poly’s to the low poly model,
- Use hard edges in the low poly geometry but this introduces other artifacts.

About bump maps, it would be nice if they could be taken into account when extracting normal maps using Mudbox. See also my thread in the Suggestions forum.

http://area.autodesk.com/for...-extracting-a-normal-map/