This will render as a corner or an edge, and this edge will need to be separated come UV mapping time to avoid baking artefacts. You could say it’s a sort of pseudo subdivision surface where, if two polygons or more share an edge and are members of the same smoothing group, they will render as a smooth surface. Use it.Ī smoothing group’s function is to make your model appear smoother without adding polys to the mesh. You can calculate how much edge padding your islands need by multiplying by 2:įor non-game engine renderers, a few pixels are often enough to avoid texture-bleed and normal mapping artefacts when baking, and almost all UV mappers have functionality for this. To avoid this, you add padding to the UV shells when unwrapping to enable whoever is texturing the model to add a "padded" edge with the same colours when texturing to avoid this from happening. This can cause different colours around your island seams if the colours of the textured shell and the background are different. When a game engine renders a texture sheet on a model, it will downsample (reduce) the texture to render it. If you're creating a game model, don't forget to keep an eye on your cuts as well, as every cut means a doubled vertice count or that part in-engineĪ good UV map also has an edge-margin and shell-padding, especially for game engines.
If you are doing hard edge models, remember to add supporting geometry around edges, as texture tends to spread around edges – the extra geometry will prevent that, and also save you the calculation cost of a triplanar. Once exported these will help you stay organised from UV to bake to final render
Also m ake your selection and texturing life easier by creating mesh, material and/or smoothing groups. Not only will the latter add to your render overhead in a game engine, they are also time sinks in terms of wild goose chases trying to find where they belong. This means no ngons, loose cuts, polys or verts.
This includes ensuring your geometry is clean.