1: Yes. When thinking about projection and skew in baking, ideally you want to think about how you size the lowpoly as well as how and in what direction you scale a cage. which is often as little a possible, ie make the low fit the high poly or suffer. On a cylinder you could just scale the cage in the axis around it and…
I am still using an ancient approach of re-rendering object/world space normal map texture into tangent one. No separate Hi res objects, just a few bevel modifiers. Sometimes just bevel/rounding corner shader. No tedious cage tweaks . That way you miss sometimes a proper curvature bake from a baking soft but there are lots…
I've been trying to learn basic modeling since about Feb of this year in order to build and texture some farm implements in Blender to use in Farming Simulator 2015. The impetus is that most modders rarely texture their work and the results are an eyesore in-game. Actual modeling of high poly things is going well and is…