Never use jpg for texturing, it loses quality every time it’s saved. Use png, tga or tiff.
The low-poly mesh should never have hard edges at visible places, baking around hard edges will always be ugly.
Lower the rendering samples to 8 for much faster bake times without any visible quality loss. (Properties Editor > Render > Sampling > Render) - default is 128 which is way too slow.
My question is, why? The only difference I am seeing between the corrected file and my original one that I sent you is that I have an extra low poly object. I thought step 3.1 above told me to duplicate the object then remove the texture off of the duplicated object leaving me with 2 low poly objects and 1 high poly. (Total of 3)
Was I not supposed to duplicate the low poly object and remove its texture?
Also,
The low-poly mesh should never have hard edges at visible places, baking around hard edges will always be ugly.
What do you mean by that, should I just bevel the edges more?
About the duplication, it doesn’t matter. All I did was set the two normalmaps, created a new image, made a node using that image, made it active and bake. I did nothing special.
About the hard edges, I would make the whole mesh smooth and add a simple bevel. But that could lead to distorted projection, so I would also edit the normals to get better shading. That could also bite me in the ass because Blender can’t bake to edited normals, so I would use Handplane (another program specialized in baking from hp to lp) to do the baking. Another problem is that you have ngons, always triangulate before baking because when you export the mesh it will be triangulated or if not, it will be triangulated when you import it in Unity and the shading of the mesh won’t match the shading of the mesh when the normalmap was baked which would also lead to artefacts. But at this point, since you have flat shading everywhere, it won’t cause any problem.
Now, if you read this all through, I’m pretty sure that you’re beyond confused, so let’s just forget that I have said anything about the hard edges and call this model finished.
For whatever reason, I found that the material I append from the original file you sent me does not work for me however when I append the material from the corrected file you sent me, everything works fine. No idea why.
Thanks for all the help, this is exactly what I needed. I marked the solution above as the answer.