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Toby3D said:

I'm trying to figure out how to make holes in a cylinder with booleans, and I just can't get it to look good. I've been checking this thread, google and a few other places, but I haven't found any solution yet. As you can see, there is some weird shading around the holes. I played around with different cylinders, trying out to change the amount of sides on both the main piece and the boolean, but nothing really changed.

I did play around with hard / smooth edges and giving the whole model hard edges fixes the shading, but of course that isn't a solution since I want it to be a smooth cylinder. 

Is my cylinder simply too low? Is there a problem with the topology? Is it perhaps some tension? 

Okay, so I got some time to test Pior's method out and initial results look pretty good.

This was my first attempt so ofcourse we might achieve better results with some iteration. I'll try to make a step-by-step video soon to cover the whole process, but it's pretty simple.

Programs I used:

Affinity Photo - for conversion of original normal map to a curvature map

Marmoset Toolbag 4 - for baking

Results:

top is original model subdivided to about 1.5 million tris, bottom is original model with baked normal map applied (no color map applied, I just wanted to show the normal maps effect in isolation)

Curvature map created in affinity photo from the original normal map

So - no surprise - it's definitely a viable method and not too time intensive. A programmer might even setup an automated solution if the baking could be accomplished in a single application? At the minimum, the convert normal map to curvature steps could be automated into an action - I know photoshop can do that, probably affinity photo can I'd expect.

A tech artist might be able to provide some insight about best ways to handle conversion processes involved here. The first thing I do is convert the .dds format to a .png because affinity photo doesn't recognize .dds. I use marmoset to make the conversion - it just does whatever it does I have no idea.

For the conversion in Affinity from normal to curvature I just followed the steps shown here:

Curvature map from Normal map in Photoshop - quick and easy - YouTube

but it is slightly different in Affinity photo. I had to use the 3d filter rather than emboss, and I just left default settings except for the azimuth/angle. I am sure you could tweak the other values to fine-tune your results.

In Marmoset I subdivided the mesh to about 1.5 million triangles to get a decent result. If you have a slow computer that may be an issue. On my machine it was still an instant bake, so I think subdividing entire characters with very high polycounts may be okay.

Well, like I said I'll try to get a video to cover the step-by-steps tomorrow or ASAP.

Some additional things I'll explore when I have time:

Some AI algorithms to upscale color textures? Would this look good, or just create artifacts?

Apply some subtle microdetail patterns to color map or microsurface maps to give impression of greater detail?

Tweak the curvature map and see how it might effect the subdivided mesh - also if there would be any automation, got to make sure a standardized output is created - i.e. the middle gray value needs to be the same on every curvature map.