Thread by @delaneykingrox

Say you have a round tube as your high poly (black), and a chunky hexagonal tube as your low res (blue with green interior) your ray casts will miss at the corners (red).

https://twitter.com/BriannaWu/status/1394291774856781825

You can see this here

You get wonky lines and little dark dents where the rays hit unevenly

A couple of tricks to avoid this.

You can add more divisions into your low capture mesh so it clings to the high evenly, do the bake, then remove those extra edges in the actual game asset.

You can avoid baking the edge of the tube (black crosssection) by extending the high res a little up (blue), baking it and cutting the low mesh (green) at the texture edge ( yellow), and bake the tops (fig 3 seperately flat.

Or you can not bake it at all, and use a trim sheet with a precise bevel on it, and uv map that so it aligns with your edge, giving you perfectly crisp, straight trims.

Another trick is to use NO baked normal maps and instead add a thin strip of polys and orient the normals to the larger faces (face weighted normals)

The latter lends itself very well to ME for close up LODs because they are mostly hard surfaces or thick materials. Face weighted normals look crisp at any resolution, and you only really need it for the upper shoulders neck guards and sheps back details where the camera aims

It wouldn't force the model into reskinning either, as you can usually project weights easily enough.