Topology of the car is perfect man ,
And the industry standard way of making cuts and shamfers , its correct leave it ,
If anything add more on curves and cut it back in with triangles
Is there such a thing as industry standard? Surely it depends on the rendering engine and other features of it? And eventually what the end results look like vs other approaches.
I'm fairly sure on the Forza meshes I saw recently, they were using a flat surface (the panel edges) and then a 45deg chamfer edge, and had the normals for the entire curved bit (0 > 90deg) done via the normals over that 45deg geometry part.
I've yet to try this in AC. Maybe AC doesn't support per-vert normals?!
It's just a technique that should be more volumetrically accurate (as in the mesh follows more closely the real one at chamfers), and easier to author, and easier to tweak meshes, and easier to texture map, and saves polygons, and is just better in every way.
You just need to manage the modified normals using appropriate workflows (pita in Max, maybe why people avoid it?!)
So here is a mesh with a chamfer, roughly.
Purple = normals set by the average of the face directions per vert.
Green = modified normals.
Yellow/red lines are the apparent normal flow.
Having an extra row in there, and technically wrong geometry, to 'fake' the normal flow to look like a curve, when the geometry can actually be closer to reality, be averaged better to the real average of the chamfer (45deg), and explicitly set the normals to achieve that.
If this is industry standard, it's old industry standard.
As said, there is a polycount thread on this that is years old, and I'm fairly sure Forza H1 and Forza 3 were using this technique for the realtime models.
For photomode they actually appear to use high density curved chamfers.
On the cutting in more triangles for panel edges, do you do this so the new triangle normals are co-incident with the accompanying face it was cut into?
My only concern with these cut in triangles is the normal flows can get quite kinky right where you notice bad normal flows into curves/creases etc, if the new triangles contribute to a more curved edge into the panel edge/crease etc.
I'm not sure if it's better to run the loop further back to a flatter part of the car (1d curvature) and then have the triangle there where it won't contribute to wonky normals.
Ie, door handle scoop outs often have a load of triangles cut in, but they're essentially on 1d curved surfaces so are almost invisible.
I'll admit I just add extra triangles and tweak till it looks ok, but the normal flows can look a bit squiffy despite it being geometrically as close as it can get.
It's just a fairly different discipline to run loops back a bit before creating the triangle in a better location.
