Another thing is the sharpness of your edges. Your high-res mesh has sharp, hard chamfers whereas the cube bake you're trying to replicate has rounded, soft bevels.
looks cool, the only crit I can give is the texture is a bit overly sharp. like you went to heavy on the sharpen filter and ended up with sharp noisyness in some areas.
Just one seam going down is all you should need, and the loop around the mouth, because there is a sharp angle there. you need seams at the sharp angles to flatten stuff out.
A WIP girl I'm currently making. Playing with the edge sharpness in blender to get a controlled low poly feel with sharp cartoony features. Gonna see where this style takes me.
yeah I agree, the sharpness of a medieval longsword is a urban legend, just a fantasy feature, so as a fantasy game sword it wouldn't hurt if it was sharp, but it doesn't kill the look to leave it that way
XnView is super useful for me. You can set up and save Batch Convert setups, to automatically downsize things, and optionally add a bit of sharpening (a little is much better than a lot!). Also, for the stage that you're at, the image quality is not really a hinderance at all. You just want people to be able to see your…
Seams from islands is only used as a lead-up to selecting the mark as sharp feature... You could always select the entire mesh and clear seams once the edges are marked as sharp :P
There is a reflection toggle? That is news to me =D Specular and reflection are one in the same, if you want a blurrier spec/reflection turn the sharpness done, if you want sharper reflections, turn the sharpness up.
improving - watch the corners of the mouth, they are a bit sharp and some weird shading errors there. perhaps the sharp lines should be softened off a little on the neck, she is getting a bit mannequin looking in places
This is more like smooth round rather than smooth floor, but maybe you can work with it: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/t8ev8mqdls a = number of steps b = sharpness it runs into problems with a "sharpness" value below 15.