Making machined metal objects, while fun as long as it’s the high polygon model, becomes a headache when it comes to the low polygon model, mainly because hard edges and any angle over 45° become a problem with normal mapping. I’ve remade this low polygon model from scratch at least 4 times since Sunday. It’s looking “all right” but the welds are not coming out as nicely as i hoped. Part of it is probably due to how aggressively I’ve been on the triangle count. The model is remarkably efficient tho, 700 triangles, that’s less than a single sculpted prim…

But maybe it’s a little “too” low.

I also discovered that my weathering method doesn’t work with render to texture so I am going to  try to pre-render the different masks instead of doing them dynamically like I had planned, which means that all the high poly parts are going to need texture coordinates.