Ive changed the smoothing to be hard edged on steep angles and I think the whole thing looks pretty good now, or atleast alot better than it did before. with metal texture:
Hi! Checking the lowpoly in Blender with the Normalmap applied, there are similar shading errors as you show. How does the lowpoly + Normalmap look in Toolbag? Did the shading of the lowpoly change by any chance since the bake? That said, I agree with gnoop on improving the lowpolys' shading. Hard edges at steep angles…
I suppose you could select edges by UV seams and set them to hard which should remove some mayor shading gradients. Then check if the result is improved when baking anew.
I just baked a segment with edges given the 'harden edge' option in maya and the normal map came out much better, im slightly confused however but after watching some videos if I understand correctly I should smooth all the edges except the hard ones? I was under the impression you wanted to smooth the entire mesh.
Your problem is on modelling side. I see same huge shading gradients on your mesh too. And while normal map can theoretically counter-measure them in a perfectly "synced" workflow you would never get it looking perfectly right in actual game anyway . 8 bit normal map with compression just doesn't have enough precision for…
Yeah there are areas which are quite broken and im not sure how that happened tbh, but those areas are small and unnoticeable, unless there are areas that are broken that I dont know about. I just wanted to get it over with because this project was annoying me so I chose to ignore those areas. You mentioned my uv island…