Thanks guys : )) Mischievous: this i will not release a level for download most likely, but I will probably do some pretty detailed breakdowns eventually : ) Jeff: there are no highres models! : ) Its all built using one tiling texture :) Except the robot and helmet, but their highpolys are kinda shitty :D
yeah I cant help but feel theres something gone wrong with your smoothing groups/phong shading. can you post a pic of the highpoly in gray next to the low in gray with just normal map? then maybe people can help sort out any issues?
I really love the model, nice work. One question, how was your workflow around the wheels? In your Highpoly you have the wheels all nice and clean but in your final model they flat and messed up. How did you do it from start to finish? :)
There are a number of ways to do it but you could just sculpt the tears and then if you really wanted to have the holes on your highpoly, you could retopo the holes and just project your detail. I might even just model them into the mesh I was going to sculpt onto.
There is no need to do UVs for highpoly in most case. What kind of Normal Maps do you mean? Microsurfaces ? Could you give more information or some example? High to Low is more preferred in professional studios, but it depends on pipelines. Some studios do Low first.
Playing around with some of the suggestions. Octa-Geophere: Standard sphere with poles on the edges: Highpoly geo results: Edge of a comfy chair: Both give pretty smooth results in the end, but the corner poles is much cleaner and you can get away with fewer polys in the low model.
Mental Ray has (had?) the habit of not ignoring the Lowpoly during baking and hitting it instead of the Highpoly. Try adding an edit Poly Modifier beneath the Projection Modifier, select all polys and hide them (don't hide the object, but all faces) and see if the errors still appear.
If you use Maya I would make sure to enable viewport 2.0 for anything highpoly, and delete all history first. But personally I wouldn't bother with Maya for the bake. But use xNormal instead. I find xNormal just easier to work with and find it performs better.
Everything is still baked in xnormal but I am just outputting object space and then vertex colors off of several sets of highpoly models. AO and cavity in xnormal are the slowest outputs so it's a huge time saver. I also prefer the look of the cavity masking that zbrush generates.
My first impression is that your highpoly is very very tight.. loosen up all these edges.. I can't even make out much of a difference between high and low poly.. you won't get much of an effect in your normal map if you keep it that way