Looks good but you've got lots of artifacts here and there. There's some weird triangulation on the legs and the circular parts have nasty poles that shouldn't be there judging by the high poly model. You should post some shots of the low poly model with the wireframe on if you need help tracking the source of these issues. It has potential to look good once these problems are fixed.
I'd like to see the low poly as it is now, cause there's got to be something wrong you're overlooking. The highi poly mesh seems clean, there shouldn't be this kind of stuff. Try baking your normals again in XNormal and compare the results.
Alright, here's the low poly model ( the previous one posted is a bit weird looking because I added a smoothing group the whole thing, It wasn't baked either ) with a wireframe. No smoothing group. No normals baked. Just as is.
The low poly still has a really high poly count overall though, so if you can see anything I can knock off before I bake, that would be very helpful. The count is somewhere above 5000.
OH! Man, I'm so sorry, I totally misread your post on that first model, I could swear it was a low poly with a normal map applied, don't know why. Now having in mind that it's purely the low poly model with the smoothing groups all messed up makes the whole thing much clearer. There's nothing wrong with the model, but you should carefully set your SGs before the bake, it can make a lot of difference in some areas of the model.
As for the polycount, it really depends on how close a player would be able to see the model. Since it's a clock I assume it's not a very large prop, so you could actually probably do without all of those little parts and the clock pointers as they don't have much depth to them and coule be normal mapped easily. And if you absolutely need the pointers to animate or something you could just add them to a plane with an alpha.
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner felipe. I'll definitely start knocking those little guys down. There were some issues found with the high poly ( which messed up the low poly ) so I'm fixing those now, but I should have a better model coming up soon with textures and all that jazz. Woo!
So I've baked normals and textured the clock. However after putting it into unreal, I just can't help feel that this looks like shiny cardboard. Does anyone know how to get a really nice looking gold?
I think the cardboard look you have is due to no smoothing groups.
you should take every edge that should have a smooth transition to it and assign a smooth group,
as far as materials go, a good reflection map and a deeper color should help, it has the specularity, but no glossiness, which a reflection map will help fake.
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The low poly still has a really high poly count overall though, so if you can see anything I can knock off before I bake, that would be very helpful. The count is somewhere above 5000.
As for the polycount, it really depends on how close a player would be able to see the model. Since it's a clock I assume it's not a very large prop, so you could actually probably do without all of those little parts and the clock pointers as they don't have much depth to them and coule be normal mapped easily. And if you absolutely need the pointers to animate or something you could just add them to a plane with an alpha.
you should take every edge that should have a smooth transition to it and assign a smooth group,
as far as materials go, a good reflection map and a deeper color should help, it has the specularity, but no glossiness, which a reflection map will help fake.