Issues With The Occultium.

Pwwka

LoPoly Noob. I'm Converting This HiPoly to a Practical Lo, and would really, really appreciate any of the following:
Advice on the architecture of the low, and how smoothing groups should best be applied.
Advice on limiting the Nmap artifacts in the bake (considering all sgroups already have UV seams, and there is padding).

Thanks in advance - your advice is highly valued, as always.

ActionDawg

It looks to me that you've just made the edges too sharp on the high poly for the detail to feasibly transfer in the bakes. Typically you'll want to make your high poly models a bit softer than what you'd expect from reality, because the harder the edge the less pixels will be there in the normal map to represent that change.

Also, it's hard to tell from your cropped textures, but you should consider how much edge padding you've got. Too little will result in artifacts if this object were to ever mipmap.

Pwwka

This is some solid advice, thank you very much. I never would have thought it necessary to consider something like this in a HiPoly model.