if you want to capture that toonyness aspect you definitely need to soften up your edges. pull back those control edges significantly so you can get some nice soft smoothness going on..... generally everywhere. to be honest it doesnt look HP at all. do that.. itll help.
The edges are worn everywhere, that looks a little bit off. This isn't the case everywhere. Some edge getting any contact anywhere, you should think about this. Where does the weapon reach a surface. Where does the usage touch any surface to wear off a material or a paint? Keep that in mind.
Hey man this looks really good! Are you going to make a game res model of this? I have a feeling your render set up may be making your edges seem sharper than they really are, could we see a few viewport shots to see if your edges are too sharp?
The angles of your highpoly are too sharp, one big give-away is the jagged edges in your bake. Soften up the edges and this will bake much better, and also keep more detail from far distances. And the UDK seam could be your lightmap... maybe make the seam go straight down.
Hm. Maybe ctrl+a all edges, click ctrl and vertex subobject mode to convert the selection to all verts connected to your edges, then ctrl+i to invert and you should have all isolated verts selected (I think?) There's also a clean vertices tool somewhere if I remember correctly..
Can you show a standard shaded version and not a AO version. It;s really hard to tell what is going on. I think you have a lot of issues with edge sharpness and edge thickness. I can't really tell though because of your renders. Also post up some wires!
Also, using a proper cage means no seams where you have hard edges. If you turn off the cage in max, or use the default ray distance setting in XN you'll get visible seams in your normals, ao, etc around any hard edges/smoothing group splits.
Okay, so I slimmed down the blade so it isnt so thick. I think that it helps alot, I replayed the game to check on the sword and the blade doesnt really seem to thin out. I also sharpened up a few edges and added some missing edge loops as well.
If there aren't any hard edges on the model itself (please also check the exported file, not just the mesh in your scene) you might want to take a look at the settings of the low-poly mesh inside xNormal. There is an option that determines whether to use the information from the file or all hard or soft edges:
This is incredible work guys! The Divison is one of my favorites in terms of visual consistency and image quality. I would've guessed that these details were material-layer blended using vertex colors applied only to the bevel. Basically an inner edge that is vertex painted and guarded by the actual non painted bevel…