The Art of Gee

Currently working on this head model still WIP.

Here is another update with the new geometry normal map and uv . 

Here is another knife that I'm working on as well but I'm going to take what I learn from the first one and transfer it over to this one.

This is a test normal map I still have to rearrange the UVs for a better bake but there are no crazy errors.  One thing that I have noticed is that you can kind of get a sense of what your bake will be like when you have edge smooth on the mesh.  You can get rid of issues by adding control edges and also making sure that your faces are not flipped.  I'll post more images later.

Well this is has been a learning process I think I got it down now.  Well I had to change the geometry of the my knife just a bit to get rid of unnecessary polygons.  Then I split up the UV's based on the hard edges of the object.  I then harden the edges where needed.  Then I made sure the following items were set.  First for the low-poly mesh making sure that under mesh controls the vertex Normal Method is set to Anglle And Area Weighted.  Next Making sure that in the Tranfer Maps Advacne options' tab Match using is set to Geometry Normals.  And then there is it is:

So the issue was in the mesh setting under mesh control: Area and Angel weighted got changed to unweighted. Weird but it has been fixed so here is my tangent normal map update. There are still some issue with the map if you get up close but all in all a lot better!

OK OK got some insight at polycount.com great site!  Any hooo after getting schooled I made some changes and here are the results. What I did was split up UV's by the hard edges then broke up the smoothing groups by those UV regions.  Then baked in Maya  Here is a help full link that Avanthera  on polycount gave to me it some good reading: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

SOOOOOOO! Here is the normal map used for that render the tangent map and the object map. Man you see how clean the object map is what the what man tangent you fail!

Well I have been working on my zbrush   maya  pipeline trying to make sure everything is set.  Also Like is said I have been working on something every day.  Granted it wasn't a new object every day but I have been working.  Anyhow Here is what I have and my current issue.  The object normal map looks perfect but the tangent normal map looks like crap.  How do I fix this without spending a lot of time in photoshop?  Should I just re-project it?