pov model? You're using a lot of tris on the edges/corners, are you utilising smoothing groups or just one smoothing group and letting all the normals do the work?
That's a smoothing error, to get rid of that, in editable poly, select the poly, and on the modifier menu, scroll down to the smoothing group section. Click Clear All. It should then be a solid colour.
^ Smoothing groups for sure. if I were you i'd select the whole body of the car and clear all smoothing groups, then go back through and assign them accordingly.
I am pretty happy with this, maybe could possibly push it a little more (like adding a different texture to the smooth sections so it's not as smooth) but I can live with this. On to the next part!
i think in some cases zbrush is valuable on these tasks too. especially the alternative smooth is super valuable to me when handling smooth modelled surfaces. Also on Blendshapes it helps a ton
Hey, how would you go about making pipes and such? Do you have a way of adding the smoothness to a normal map or do you rely on smoothing groups or extra geometry?
I'll try: What applications were used to create this, especially for baking maps and texturing? Was low poly model totally smoothed or it had smoothing groups and UV splits at hard edges?
I'm not sure what program you're using but it looks like your smoothing normals are all jacked up. In Maya these are defined by hard/soft edges. In Max these are defined by smoothing groups.
http://polycount.com/discussion/115351/smoothing-out-edge-borders-in-zbrush Does this help? There are other smooth brush modifiers you can play with aside from the Min Connected one.