Post #2180998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44PT8XRZRGA Everything old is new again. It's all just fancier and fancier bump maps 😆. I really don't understand why this technique isn't used more often, honestly. Not only is it more efficient for the GPU and CPU to have simpler models to load and render, having the detail get baked into the texture means it's easier to iterate on, and you need fewer bespoke textures to handle AO, normals, etc. on knobbly surfaces. It's also WAY faster to do in general than sculpting all that detail into every single model, baking down to low-poly, going through Substance Painter, etc. You can do your detail work up-front on the material in Substance Designer or Material Maker, then use it on as many surfaces as you want. It's easier to break up tiling with extra random noise at different scales this way, too, which is trickier with baked-normal or tessellated-high-poly modular components.