Edge padding is necessary, and its not a "bad artifact", you can also never have too much edge padding. Edge padding stretches the border colors of the map past the uv layout(so it won't show up on your model) so that when your texture mip maps down to a smaller resolution, it doesn't blend into the background. This…
Watch this to understand smoothing groups [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Iswm1xKtGs"]3D Studio's Max Smoothing Groups Tutorial - YouTube[/ame] You want hard edges that your smoothing groups creates to match with your UV borders, there are tools to do this automatically but I wouldn't rely on them, TurboTools has a…
i dont think smoothing groups is the main issue here. first of all: your low-poly model with applied normal map doesn't look too bad! so there is no real bad issue as far as one can see from your renders. the "artifacts" around your normal map probably result from edge padding. this is helpful (for mipmapping i believe).…