A few questions regarding baking normal maps.

Bluestemos

Hey guys,
I've been trying to bake a model I've been working on, but I've encountered a few issues I'd like some clarification on.

So, first off (there are threads about this, though I didn't manage to find one that would match my situation/have an answer), there are seams in the normal map along each and every one of my UV splits - and they're really prominent as well:



I've tried baking in xNormal, Handplane and Substance Painter. Painter gives the best results without a cage, and the normal map in the image is baked in SP. I've tried avoiding using a cage, since with xNormal I'd always have to remake it each time I do some changes or make it in C4D which has nightmarish normal extrusion tools.

I'm using mirrored UV's, but I've baked the model with both sides on to maintain the proper vertex normals along the seam.

Another issue I'm having is artifacts on areas that have large angle differences:

I haven't set any edges as hard. Instead, I've been using a global smoothing (Phong) value of 90 degrees, which seems to work acceptably but not when the edge angle is greater than 90, which I'm guessing is what causes this artifact. 

Here's another part of the normal map which seems quite screwed - I'm guessing it's for the same reason as the previous image:

I also tried reducing the phong value to 60, which resulted in a normal map which created way more artifacts.

So, in a nutshell, how could I go about getting rid of the seams and the edge artifacts? And also, how smooth should the model be when it's baked? I've seen people saying that the model should be "completely smooth" (180 degree shading angle?), but when I tried baking that way the normal map looked like it sucked the polygons inwards.

Should I just split my edges manually, add some extra geo and make a cage? What about the smoothing angle?

Thanks a ton 

Justo

Bluestemos said:

I haven't set any edges as hard. Instead....

sdfsdf I think there's your first mistake. You don't lose anything by using hard edges where your UVs split, and the end result looks nicer because your normal maps will have less extreme gradients which you usually never want. Read this. 

As for the projection errors, it'd hard to tell by not knowing how your UVs look like, but I'd like to think that those are simply ray projection errors. Try increasing their range of distance before baking. Sometimes though this'll cause other areas to start skewing or have other errors, for which you'd probably have to use more geo.