Thanks for advice! One thing that was bugging me, though, is xNormal AO/Normals bake quality. I've fiddled with ray distance settings a lot, but artifacts persisted no matter the values (clipped sides in cracks and other problems like that). And even putting that aside, the maps that were rendered by xNormal featured areas…
You'r welcome, a quick note regarding the edge-highlight map I was talking about in these videos. Technically the texture map that I'm using is called a curvature map which can be rendered in Xnormal. You can get much better results in Xnormal compared to what I got in Mudbox or Crazybump. I'll add the note in the 4th part…