What other options/alternatives are there to "edge split" for smooth shading low poly game models.
As I understand it, edge split does what it say's, its splits the mesh therefore increasing the vert count. I have considered manually marking the edges as sharp however I would imagine this leaves artifacts on the model(in-game) ?
Cheers.
If you want to make an object smooth in a game then you need to use a shader that smooths it by interpolating the normals between vertices (in the game, not in blender of course). You can read more about smooth shading like Gouraud or Phong on wikipedia.
Manually marking the edges sharp in a model would require you to store that as vertex information when passing it to the shader. It is an interesting idea but could probably easier be aquired by drawing different model parts using different shaders in most cases I guess.
