I'm still struggling to understand exactly what baking is supposed to achieve. From what I understand, baking transfers information from the high-poly mesh to the low-poly mesh through textures, such as normal maps. But is baking mainly intended to capture surface details, rather than actually changing the shape or silhouette of the low-poly mesh? For example, my high-poly model has very smooth, rounded edges that I want to reproduce on the low-poly. However, the low-poly has very sharp edges, and baking the high-poly normal map doesn't seem to make those edges look properly rounded. So, if I want the low-poly to have the same smooth edge appearance as the high-poly, do I actually need to add more geometry/supporting edges to the low-poly? Or is there a proper baking technique or workflow that allows the normal map to reproduce those soft, rounded edges without adding additional geometry? I'm trying to understand where the limit of normal maps is in this situation and what should actually be handled by the low-poly geometry versus the baked normal map.   submitted by   /u/Some-Locksmith-1602 [link]   [comments]