General Rivets - normal map or physical geometry?

[Emery]

As I'm looking at rivets, I realize that sometimes we need to paint over them, so making sure they're in the correct place on the painting template is a high priority. How do I decide which to use? Which do you prefer?

Baking them into a normal map seems the more likely method provided the skin is high enough resolution.

And if they're physical, how do you cut them into the body mesh? Or if they're not cut into the body mesh, how do you ensure they're in the correct location after unwrapping?

 

[Stereo]

In Blender there's a "copy vertex data" modifier that I use for painted rivets. It just copies the UV from the main object.

I don't think baking the main body texture as a normalmap is a good idea. The "old" norm is single quads with normalmaps baked onto them and semitransparent black. I believe you make reflections/specular proportionally stronger so you have say, 5% alpha and 2000% specular cancel out and it looks the same as specular on the body.


In general for efficiency purposes a black circle indicating the outer edge of the rivet casting a shadow (again alpha overlaid) and dot in the middle if it's that kind of rivet, is not gonna be distinguishable from these other options unless you look very closely though. I'd use those everywhere except the cockpit and other places you see from 1st person. Also means you avoid some bad transparency glitches in CM/CSP normalmap shaders.

 

[CaptainLykaios]

I would use normal maps instead. usually a flat plane with decent res 256x256, 512 max should be enough for a rivet. Then if you give it an Alpha to make it slightly see-through it will appear as the colour of the body.
Then you can just copy and paste them all over the model where needed