Low Poly, UVs & Bakes
The process of making low poly was not too complex. Most of the time, I reused meshes from the blockout stage; I just accepted boolean operations, and if there were any drastic changes (like merged 3D ornaments), I did some manual retopology with RetopoFlow.
The most frequently asked question about low poly creation is how many polygons/segments you need. You can always measure it by setting camera views in your scene or bringing the weapon into the first-person view in-game and comparing: the silhouette should be smooth enough and not have any visible polygonal edges. So if the 16-edge-based cylinder for a barrel has visible edges, start to increase segments to round the circle shape.
But sometimes we need to add more geometry, even if it doesn’t have an impact on the silhouette. For example, for the sake of better UV packing, when we have long, thin islands that don’t allow us to fully fit the UV square. Or when we have overly strong normal bending artifacts, some edge slicing helps resolve the distortions.
In my case, I kept the star-decorated elements in the geometry, because they are visible up close in-game from the first-person view. I also kept the cord pretty dense, because it was supposed to be rigged and needed enough segments to perform realistic physics.
So first, I updated my export proxies’ Geometry Nodes again with low-poly meshes to test them in-game. The fancy cord belt on the barrel was done by remeshing the original high poly, so I have a solid piece with no holes between the cords; then I created a vertex group attribute and painted weights in Weight Paint mode to be used later with the Decimate modifier.
The idea was to make the decimator reduce more geometry in the areas that are less visible to players in the game view. You can notice the orange color on the inside area, while the visible outside areas have less impact. The belt’s edges are painted blue, which means they have 0 decimation applied. After decimation is done, I collapse the modifiers and cut a straight line inside – this is a UV seam, which allows me to unwrap this piece as a rectangle with perfectly straight edges.
