Is beveling a key part of making a low poly asset?

This is a low poly asset that am working on for my environment. Its only 152 faces. Is the beveling making it look better? I know its suppose to be there but very few mobile games implemented.[13308-snap+2013-07-20+at+01.12.12.png|13308]

For an asset such as this, bevelling isn’t making it look better, it makes it look quite soft edged infact, and most of your bevelling, whilst noticable now using the maya blinn shader, won’t be so noticable once textures have been added.

I would recommend getting rid of the bevelling here, I’m guessing that’d bring you down to something like 70 faces in total perhaps, to lower that even further I’d highly recommend having the roof as a seperate piece that just floats ontop, this is really common and I myself do it quite often, that should lower your polycount even more, whilst still keeping the same shape.

If you need to keep your polycount low, do not use bevel, use edged textures!

While bevelling is almost mandatory in realistic 3D graphics (everything in the real world has some bevel to some degree, look at the edge of your desk RIGHT NOW, notice how its a lighter line? Well light falls around the edge, reflecting all directions, so appears lighter. This adds to realism and a cool look) However… ITS AN ABSOLUTE NO-NO in game dev. You are gonna create hundreds more tris by adding bevelling. So Dont do it!!!

If you want to fake that lighter edge, then chop your larger surfaces ( few extra quads/tris is worth it) so you can tile the middle parts of large surfaces with a tilable texture, and add an edge texture along all edges. THEN when you create your normal maps (I make them by hand on a seperate layer in Photoshop as grey scale) add the thin line there, along the edge of where your bevel would have been, you probably have to experiment whether it needs to be light to dark or dark to light) export as TGA, then in Unity go to the texture, click it, select it as a Normal Map, click from greyscale, and Unity will make your normal map for you.

Then its just a simple case of adjusting bump settings (hit apply to see them) going back into PShop and adjusting, saving and back into Unity, where it will usually just update automatically. Its fiddly, but you can quite convincingly add bevels and highlights where you need them.

OH… and dont try to make too irregular textures , simple almost flat colour works best (this why most real environmental artists create their own texture rather than using photos, the will mix together better. If you need irregular dirt or cracks or whatnot consider using a projected “decal” texture. You can turn these off ass players get further away…

ON FINAL THING! Really really try to keep the amount of materials to a minimum. consider making one big texture with all your shit on it, and then painstakingly UV mapping it, rather than selecting huge areas and applying a new material. REUSE that big material and you will get way less drawcalls.

OH and consider using the Unity combine mesh script… that can help often, even though you think you did a great job.

Mark

As a hobby, I worked on a Bevel Shader that adds smooth Edge in Unity without adding extra faces. But it does add extra data to each vertex, and I haven’t done tests to see if triangle reduction will compensate this data overhead in terms of performance comparing to simply adding more faces.

On my journey to bevel, I made a mesh editor to package mesh data and with it realized that smooth bevel can be achieved with adding just one face to edges. Smooth Beveling But not letting it affect the normals. I also asked ProBuilder to include this option.

And IMHO Beveling totally makes everything look way better. My main argument is the recent (2019) Resident Evil 2 remake. Bevel edge will always add a bright line if the light source is between perpendiculars to the faces attached to the edge. Sorry for messy sentences).

Also, Skyrim has lots of Beveling in their models. You can compare it to Elder Scrolls MMO where sharp edges prevail and see the difference in the feel.