So, its important to understand that you don't necessarily need to harden edges at your UV splits. But you absolutely must split your UVs along your hard edges. Giving your sharp angles hard edges will reduce the shading gradients and yield a better result on the normal map because the gradients won't be so extreme. Once…
I finally found a solution, quite painfully. Here's the workflow that I found, not 100% perfect but that's definitely a starting point. - lowpoly and hipoly modeling in Maya - set a minimum amount of hard edges on the lowpoly to avoid too sharp angles (>=90°), and unwrap in a way that every hard edge is also a UV border -…