Normal Baking - Curve Waviness

Haftoof

So I'm working on a Dota 2 Piece and I'm having some curiousity on how to work through the below: 

Right side appears to be Jagged, left side looks smooth.   I'm just curious on how to go about improving it.   I have a feeling more geo is the answer, but Geo is kind of rough in Dota 2, heavily limited poly's.  

Scruples

Hard to say when we don't know how big the piece is and can't see the wireframe, it also might look fine when viewed at the correct distance.

Haftoof

Scruples

It looks fine, the curvature on the 2nd, smaller horn looks a little unbalanced to me. (oh and the dark spot on the upper horn should probably be fixed too).

Haftoof

Yeah but in terms of the retopology I'm having issues.  The right side is the retopo.   Yeah small fixes on the curves that could use some work. 

Scruples

Is there any particular reason why you went with quad only? It really shouldn't matter since this part doesn't deform.

Haftoof

No particular reason, just building out the topology.  

Haftoof

Bump any other ideas on why the normal map would cause the low poly to dip in along the edges like that? 

huffer

Oh yeah, needs more geometry - more segments that make the low poly conform better to the high means less black gaps (for the left side) and less waviness in the right side. Have a look at the "who put waviness in my normal map..." thread. One solution is adding two edge loops, left and right of the right edge, baking, then removing them in the final low poly, it may or may not work in this case. Also, that kind of waviness might be ok in the end...unless you zoom in a lot it might not be so noticeable.

Haftoof

Huh... so adding more geo then removing the edge loops...  I'll give that a try... see if it helps.  I read some of that threat but not all of it... I'll give it a look-see and see how it helps.  Bakers do magic it seems, any other advice would be awesome. 

Haftoof

@huffer That seemed to help actually, seems I need to play with the poly-gon count and find one I'm happy with, the waviness is lessened by the edge loops Really appreciate it, made a world of difference. 

I think I'm also gonna break up the object a bit (seperate out the horns and hair for baking) then combine all the maps together.  

Really appreciate the feedback.