I’m wondering if the way I put seams in certain areas and unwrap my model would affect my normal map “look”?
I ask this because I modeled a high poly gun, removed some edge loops to lower the poly count and I baked the normals. However the normal map still had distorted areas and things that should have been solved and I separated each of the gun pieces away from eachother to bake the normals better. I used blender and xnormals and got a bad result on both but blender did a bit better which was a surprise. I’m asking this now because the next model I make I want to make sure I’m doing things the right way. I did have some texture stretching on the gun for some areas but I didn’t think it would matter since some of the areas were not visible. I also heard smoothing can make normal maps look bad but idk. It seems its easier to normal map a mesh thats not separate pieces but its hard to do that with a gun or other objects with separate parts.