Can you post pictures of your highpoly, lowpoly and normal map? Maybe some images of the specific shading errors you are getting. Also try just baking a tangent space normal map.
Create a set of keyframes, and simply move each highpoly and lowpoly chunk apart so they no longer intersect, and then bake it all at once. If you're exporting to xnormal, make sure the "exploded" version is on keyframe 0.
Gotta agree, the metal material definition is really nicely done on the second plane. Tighten up some of the highpoly elements to fix the blobbiness, you got two solid pieces! Really well done.
You use Shading Normal as the output and use the Render menu > Bake From Object to Render Outputs. That's with your low + UV channel selected and the highpoly items as visible background (not selected/active) layers.
Its the vertex normals. If you don't want to do highpoly from this, and you only need the lowpoly, look into "face weighted normals". If you want subd, you need better topology indeed.
There is a lot of diferent materials on him..and thats great. I decided to skip highpoly stage, and put my handpainting skills to test right away! block out mesh..which will be retopoed/reproportioned later.
This is sooo pleasing to the eye! After all those normal maps and highpolys, its nice to see something so natural and pretty. That first pic with Kvas....made me want it. Gotta go to the store.
Base highpoly pass of the back handle is done,now I move to the center of the weapon :) ...can't tell if I am not putting enough hours on it or if I am just slow modeling/designing xD
Not on the highpoly and i´m not sure yet if i´ll have floating geometry on the lowpoly or bake everything into the texture. I guess FWN would make sense for some parts like the armor and helmet.
Cool, I agree with the points already made - I think if you posed up the highpoly ZBrush sculpt to match some of these poses then it'd make an awesome 3D print! I love the style.