xNormal is baking the height information for each vertex in the low poly, the reason why hightmaps from programs like (for example) knald, or substance designer seem a lot smoother, is because they're creating the height map from a normalmap, not from the low poly mesh itself.
Perhaps I'm not seeing the same problems you guys are, but those look like things which can be reasonably worked around to me (in the first case by bending vertex normals, the second case being like ... just wtf are you doing, that's weird triangulating it like that).
Got rid of the floating triangle by selecting the vertex and going to edit-mesh merge. this change the color of a single poly to match that of the original polysurfaces. which is odd and concerning but atleast no floating triangle. But the same thing didn't fix the un-delete-able edge still in the wrist.
If you don't want distortion at the poles, you could make cube, normalize its UVs, then smooth it a few times and transfer vertex position from a regular sphere to get a sphere with cube-like topology. That way you can easily apply tiling textures.
Is the polish work with the ground textures done with Lerp based vertex painting, or are you using a lot of decals? Or both? because DANG what a difference that makes! Also, with the corners on the pilasters from the shipyard, are those decals over a tiling texture, or are they part of the individual asset's texture?
Perfect, could you try if this works for you when you select an object and run it (paste it in the Maxscript editor and press ctrl+E)? ePoly = $.modifiers[#Edit_Poly] -- alias, for convenience setCommandPanelTaskMode #modify -- switch to Modify panel so that we can enter subobject mode subObjectLevel = 2 -- go to edge mode…
In similar manner you can separate sleeves from torso to solve shoulder parts. Those pieces would be separate on UVs and vertex normals too, so visually it doesn't even matter if it's one object or two. If character is supposed to speak then it would probably be easier to model him with slightly open mouth. Or you can…
Decided to post some of the progress from the scene I'm working on. The goal here is to make my own environment of my own design, including all separate assets. I wanted to practice creating a coherent space where everything fits together. So far, designing all of this has been fun. I only borrowed 3 or so materials for…
Hi I am a Blender modeler and I am trying to learn Maya. I could be an idiot, but there are 2 things in Maya I have not been able to figure out how to do and its driving me crazy. Question 1) How to extrude a verticie from a polygon such that only the verticie and edge are created. In blender its simply done by clicking on…
Greetings Polycount! I have recently finished working on an environment with a friend that is inspired by The Last of Us. I hope you like! :D Video Link and for those who love big pictures, here is a massive panorama stitch of the scene http://polyplant.co/Naughty_Dog/Panormama.jpg I worked on mostly the textures, shaders…