Fixing Smoothing Groups?

ivorystar

So I'm using 3ds max and I've always had trouble with the normals looking wonky on my meshes when I bake out the normals from a high poly mesh. I know that the cause of it is from the smoothing groups in the low poly mesh. I usually set the entire mesh to 1 smoothing group or auto smooth, but it doesn't always work. I understand that the cause is really the wireframe and how the verts are placed on the mesh, but I can't help but think to myself that there must be some sort of shortcut to just fix the smoothing without having to redo the entire wireframe. Any suggestions?

Here's some screenshots of what I'm talking about:

Scruples

On that particular mesh "Face Weighted Normals" should work as it has enough supporting geometry.
read 1st post here, or the entire thing if you want to know of possible caveats> http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=85809

sprunghunt

what does the mesh look like when you apply a normalmap? normal mapped meshes often look a bit weird without a normal map applied.

ivorystar

Thank you.