Assuming that both this update and qualified normals mode work as advertised, they should be identical. Any differences in quality here could be from the position of the lights, or the fact that I just reused the xnormal map for the qualified example instead of baking out a new one in Max. I kind of figured that the…
I tested smoothing groups along UV texture border edges vs 1 smoothing group quite extensively a few months ago on statics within the UDK (from xnormal and maya bakes with custom cages). I was less worried about the compression artifacts and more concerned about the seams once imported ingame. I honestly thought I would…
@John: The settings for XNormal right off the bat are pretty lousy, for example, set your AO bake to something like Cosine within the 120-180 range. The default ones aren't that grand, it also doesn't help that most tutorials don't cover indepth these stuff and you need to read the PDF, which gets installed in the XN…