Great start! The wood grain could be more pronounced. Also I see you tried to break up the straight edges a bit. Take it further and add edge damage (cracks, etc. where the wood has splintered). Example:
the best part about edge is that future bought gamestm, helping two great mags become 1 amazing mag. worst thing about edge; it costs 3000 yen here now, up from the 1000 it used to cost.
probably because the two edges are too close together and the ray caster is getting confused as to what goes to what to be honest. I wouldn't have them buffer down into the hard sharp edge though. That just wont look right.
Try selection the upper or lower edge, hold ctrl and press the right mouse button. Now select to faces. You now have the 2 faces that share this edge selected. Deselect the unwanted face by holding ctrl while selecting.
Some engines are actually synced to the program that they generate the normal maps with, but it wasn't possible to get 100% perfect normal map generated with one tagent to an engine that uses another. But you can get rid a lot of the issues with support edges and hard edges.
Your normal map needs more than a 1 pixel edge. Not sure how you created it, but if you made the edge bigger, you would effectively make the normal map more deeper looking. Thats in regards to the circle thing in the middle.
Why not model those extra parts (essentially just one or two more polygons per edge (idk about your budget though)). It feels like using decals for those big edges at the end of the house might look a bit cheap.
N-Gons are also okay, just to be clear. As long as it looks good, it's a valid high poly model. You got some hard edges going on, which scan be resolved with subdivision modeling or having high-level bevels at the hard edges of the gun.
Yeah, been messing around for while. The OBJs definitely have hard edges on them - I can see them if I import them back into Maya. It just seems like the edges aren't being "marked sharp" when they get into Blender.
Looks like alpha blending the gradient edges. You're probably thinking about using a noise pattern instead of a gradient, for more interesting edges. And world-space UVs, so you can scale the mesh and the texture does not get scaled too.