Per128. The U-shape contains a different smoothing group. Material ID's correspond with the type of mapping and Smoothing groups. Thats Good intel thank you., I haven't put it into practice yet , cuz i have other priorities at this moment. But I trust your expertise on this one.
Looking at your models it took me about 5 minutes to realize why the textures looked so bad on the models. You need to work on utilizing smoothing groups better on your models. Everything looks smooth with no edges, and it throws everything off and makes the models look terrible.
One thing you can try is check the invert box under ur gloss map, some programs have the gloss maps inverted like ue4 has it where black is smooth and white is rough, but marmoset 2 has it where black is rough and white is smooth
@momomoonscarOn the concept it looks like the head has a smooth transition to the mouth so I'd cut in the geometry you have or extrude it and it will shade better.For things like the vines I usually start with a spline and profile as you can change the number of segments to balance polycount and smoothness.
Wow first time that I can suggest something that I know of :D ..... You need to set the crease in the edges properties , 0 or 1 makes the difference or the numbers in between for the midway results ... If not wrong 1 should result in no smoothing at all , while 0 total smooth ....
@Lankus Maximus Thanks, And yes. Basically you put edge loops around the edges and then turbo smooth, it keeps the edges sharp and smooth. For my bridge that's the exact reason. I usually dont do much HPs for architecture but I think the bridge section would need it.
@HM, It might be one of two problems You didn't smooth out the normals of your low poly- in blender select all > press ctrl+E > shade smooth. or your high poly has triangles that are creating artifacts. try increasing the polycount of your high poly.
Looks like your lowpoly mesh normals are not set up correctly. Make sure to soften the normals (maya) or work on your smoothing groups (max). Make sure if you're exporting from max that you have normals (not just smoothing groups) turned on in the obj exporter.
Use NDO, Knald, or CrazyBump like others suggested and either smooth the normals in whatever software you pick, or smooth it beforehand. Asphalt is pretty noisy and converting any regular photo to a normal map will be a nightmare. Something like "Surface Blur" in Photoshop works pretty well.
If its one continuous mesh, you've got some definate edge-flow that needs to be fixed where the ear connects, and sort out the smoothing groups. Try givin the outer surface of the ear its own smoothing group, the rest of the ear a second one, and the head a third.