I’m going through a quick course in real-time graphics at the moment, and the final task is to create as faithful a recreation as possible of a reference (Pic 1 in my case) with fairly restrictive limitations - 520 tris and 512x512 textures.
Pics 2 and 3 are screencaps from Maya, which shows the lowpoly and highpoly objects that I got my normal texture from, stacked and next to each other (in case this is a problem caused by how the meshes overlap when projecting).
In picture 4, the problem with my normals shows quite clearly - The bulgy area around the middle of the firepost (or whatever it is) becomes wavy, in quite an obvious way. The distortion is further illustrated with picture 5, taken from Marmoset. (Don’t mind the textures, they’re only half-done as of me posting this).
Now, I’ve read a number of articles and forum discussions on the subject, but I haven’t been able to distill a satifactory fix for this problem.
The one solution that I found which sorted it out was to add more geometry around the problematic area, and to smooth the edges out. But since I’m already at 520 tris (max triangle allowance), that isn’t really an option. I’ve also tried to use the liquify tool in PS to try and straighten the distortion out, and failed miserably at it, so that’s not really an option either.
So, what other options do I have? Is there perhaps another baking engine (i.e. not Mayas built-in piece of crap) which automatically compensates for this kind of distortion? Or a solid post-projection solution I haven’t tried?
I have until tomorrow to sort this out, so please, don’t hold back - Any solution is better than no solution 
Edit: Picture seem to have disappeared, adding it again.
