This is the UV 0 & 1 artifact . You can see that the High res mapped fairly well (for a small texture size mind you) apparent by the light grey ring on the cylinder edges.
And here is the worst culprit, the viewport vertex shading artifacts in the normal map, somewhat of a seperate issue then the 0 and 1 UV issue. Note that this cube has unnecessary cuts and I have hidden parts of the mesh as this is for a currently working title. As you can see, once I bake out the normal map and apply it…
Yeah I hear you on the frustration level. But it is fixable. First off, your exporter coder needs to understand how Max is creating the vertex tangents when it creates the normalmaps, then he/she needs to either export these tangents, or recreate them the same way on export. There are many ways to create these tangents. If…
1) Sure you set well the projection modifier. Sure it covers completely the highpoly model. Sure you set well the smooth groups. Caution with cylindrical and mirrored UVs. 2) Try to collapse + XForm the mesh before rendering the normal map/export mesh. 3) I think the problem is that 3dsmax averages the vertex normal when…