The normal texture is not compressed in the image. The pattern is in the actual texture. I tried what you suggested on the hand plane compressed version of the normal map by adding a light noise layer and it did obscure it a little, but it's still there. I think 99% of the time this would work for most objects (like…
it only alters how you UV in so much that you can use fewer (or no- depending on the engine) UV/smoothing splits. The quality for all the engines is good enough (including unreal) that my workflow looks like this: 1) make my lowpoly 2) UV in the way that is most intuitive to texture, minimize UV splits 3) Split smoothing…