fwiw I generally advise against baking normals onto cylindrical objects like this and to use a trimsheet-like approach instead. Using a flat tangent space normal map and allowing the mesh normals to emulate curvature generally results in a more stable result than the baked map. the main reason being: - if you're using…
Thank you all so much for your insightful input. I'm still very much at the beginning of learning how to texture, so all this is such appreciated advice. I'm gonna keep the mesh as is for now, but I really do think the trimsheet method you mentioned would be a better option in future. I have briefly looked into it and it…