Sorry, yes everything is very factually correct and well written (and should be pinned imo)! It's a great document to explain to people having trouble with their normal bakes. Basically down to, yes if you have time to do hard edges baking and setup, go for it! not all models require this though, and sometimes its…
If the tangent basis is synced between the baker and renderer, and you don't push it too far, it's totally fine to not split every last edge. Practicing, you'll get a feel for how much you can do with synced tangents and where you can push harder. The problems you can run into when pushing it too far: - Imprecision due to…
I'm glad you posted to ask for help with this as the last thing you should ever do it edit your normal maps in Photoshop to remove stuff like this. It opens a huge can of worms & can really mess your bake up :) For the custom cage, I use this method. * Triangulate your LP mesh using the Triangulate modifier set to Beauty.…
I'll just re-quote this here, as I think it goes over what you're asking I'll try to get some images up at some point, still running through my head the best way to visualize some of this. I was actually in the same boat for a long time. I worked in exactly the same way, I was even a big proponent of object space maps a…
Ok, so first things first. This is a test mesh I created to show off 3Point Shader quality mode. What that means is this mesh was created specifically for a synced normals workflow and to show off the benefits of that workflow, there isn't an excessive amount of uv seams, in fact there are less than I normally would use…
Of interest to most who will read this thread, I wrote an extensive tutorial that covers this topic and many other common baking issues. It's geared towards baking in Toolbag, but most of the Basics and Best Results sections apply universally. Check it out on the Marmoset site:…