Help with UV Unwraps and edge baking

TrevorEugeneArt

Hi everyone! I'm currently having some trouble understanding why some of my edges are smooth from my bake, and why some of them show up sharp no matter what angle you look from. 
The edges are showing very bad on my "loops" and the lock (excluding the corners). I can't figure out what is different between these? It doesn't seem like it should be a padding issue because the latch is super smooth and doesn't contain a whole lot of space between it.

I set the smoothing groups for the rings to be all of it, but would it still benefit to break every different section up into a new island?

Thanks for any help!

Quack!

What are your exact smoothing groups set up like?  Hard edges in bakes are usually caused by improper smoothing.  In general you should set your hard edges to what your UV shell borders are and soften everything else.  There are a few caveats to that, but it should get you going.

Thanez

That pinching along those edges are a classic case of hard edges without a break in the UVs. 

For optimal performance you want as much of your model in 1 UV shell, and as few hard edges as possible. A nice guide to learn this:
-Keep everything in 1 UV shell as long as it doesn't create stretching.
-Have no hard edges at all.
-Test bake and compare your bake to the highpoly side-by-side. They should look identical. Take note of all the issues that popped up.
-Harden the edges that needed it, and split the UVs at those same edges.

Once you've learned this by trial and error you'll be able to say this statement with confidence: Due to how you flattened all the edges on the highpoly to a 45° variation between the lowpoly, and that the lowpoly's "worst" edge is ~70°, I'm positive you can put that latch for the lock in 1 UV shell, with no hard edges and it'll bake perfectly.

TrevorEugeneArt

Thanks Thanez and Quack! 

So for the smoothing groups on the big loop, I have them all set as 1 group and have all the edges set to soften. I'm using MODO, so maybe there is something I am missing on export and it's not exporting with these settings?

I did another test where I broke the big loop up into a different UV island and baked it and this made that edge disappear inside the bake. So with that I feel like I am doing something wrong inside MODO that is affecting my bake.

Thanez, is there something different that would need to be done for unwrapping things as 1 island and not showing edges? The only way I am able to make these disappear is by separating every single edge that even has a remote difference in angle (and judging from you've said, and from what I've read, this is less than ideal with it doubling vert counts each time)

Thanks for any additional help I could receive!

TrevorEugeneArt

Alright I think I'm good to go now! I've been digging around in my settings and it looks like the material in MODO had the 'Surface Normals' 'Smoothing Groups' set to 'crease'. Once I changed it to 'force' all the edges baked smooth as butter.
I think, hopefully, I should be good to give it a go from here! Thanks mates!