Inflating your highpoly sounds like maybe a misinterpretation of a technique I know from Heroes of the Storm. Sculpts were given a slight inflate before the maps were baked to create thicker edge highlights. It ah, works a lot better with a dynameshed sculpt than it does with a hardsurface model.
Thank you all for your answers! To be honest this gives me more piece of mind because this approach has given me problems with simple models like this one and I cannot even imagine what would do with a more complex mesh that has more details or intricate shapes. With all the info you have given me I would call this…
Generally, you want the shapes in the high and low poly to match as closely as possible - this means that often the low poly will either be exactly the same size or both slightly bigger and smaller than the high. For something like a cylinder, the low should intersect with the high in a vacillating pattern. Here's an…
My guess his advice goes to cage model rather than low poly itself. Or it may work when you bake world space normal map to be re-baked into tangent space in a separate pass . Especially when you use some 3d party renderer that is not directly supported in package bake tool. For world space normals the actual shape of low…