Xnormal and the UVS are separated, just like if they are different pieces, with hard edge... I'm starting to wondering if that hard edge is the problem
From my experience it's same in every ray-tracer I tried. And always been that way. Mostly coming from sky/environment light . Guess it's why they do small quads with displacement + actual bevels instead of hard edges outside of gamedev. Hard edges is a gamey thing. Actually I have seen a subtle hard edge reveling with…
i'm not much of a hard surface modeler, but my first hunch for the panels might be to model them and bake them as floaters. I think that would just be simpler to do rather than try to paint it in texturing. And if you bake it you can get curvature maps and so on which can give you more flexibility in texturing. you might…
Nice Progress! Looking for more! :) you should take a look at the Hard Surface Challenge here on Polycount, there is many awesome hard surface concept! http://polycount.com/discussion/132146/week-40-the-weekly-hard-surface-challenge/p1