Hey guys, I am doing some props and I read whole document about normal maps here in polycount wiki and also I read, vertex counts are more important than polyocunts, so:
Here are 4 meshes:
HP:hipoly(for baking)
01-lowpoly-one smoothing group, for baking probably useless, coz in game engine, it will have not very nice smudges all over the model + there will be big distortion on small details, has 12verts/14polys
02-lowpoly-every side has its own smoothing group, it can be used for nice normal map , but however, it needs a lots of smoothing group and separated UVs for every smoothing group, so vertcount is rly big, has 48verts(mesh) + 24(if I count well) for UVs, so it has 72 verts of total/14polys
03-lowpoly, uses one smoothing group, but is beveled, so I can use nice normal map without using any additional smoothing groups and I got much nicer silhouette and much nicer normals on edges, it has 40 verts + (idk exactly) 10verts on UV map, so +-50verts in total/42polys

So my question is now, should I use case 02 or 03? coz I read here on polycount, vertcount is more important than polycount. Also case 03 has much better silhouette.(btw prop itself can be 1,5 meters tall in real world scale)

Thanks for ur responds ;)

If your norms were actually synced with your engine then you could use 1. Assuming they aren't synced then 3 is fine, but maybe it's just some small random prop I would probably use 2.

They are all correct ways to do it but you have to understand where it's going and how it will be used.

deadly is right! and to minimize the stretching and distortions of details in 01 adjusting and tweaking the cage helps alot.also what i like todo is make an in between of 01 02.

what engine are you working with?

with udk iv gotten god results using 03 with edited normals.

Your vert count for 02 is wrong. The hard edge splits correspond to the UV splits. Each vert can have info for one UV co-ordinate and one vertex normal. By hardening those normals, you've already provided the extra verts needed for the UVs. They don't add to it again. So the vert count is actually 48.