Best application for normal baking?

Hello,
On daily basis I am using XNormal for baking normals for cryengine assets. My workflow/pipeline assumes making one smooth group for an object and adding chamfers for hard edges. Cryenigne is fixing every smoothing bugs beyond my expectations. Unfortunately Unity 5 don't. Smoothing bugs looks almost like without normal map applied. Texture isn't improving this much.
I have even downloaded this plugin: http://www.farfarer.com/blog/2012/06/12/unity3d-tangent-basis-plugin-xnormal/
But this didn't change my bakes a bit (comparing to default "Mikk tangent space). o,O

Obviously I have followed these instructions for seting geometry in a unity scene:

• In the Inspector for the FBX file…
• Set Normals to Calculate.
• Set Smoothing Angle to 180.
• Set Normals to Import.
• Set Tangents to Calculate.

What is currently recommended application/plugin using in baking for Unity 5 engine? Maybe there is also some prefferable pipeline in assets creation which should I obey?

 

I can tell - you have really skinny triangles on all the examples you provided.
Reduce the length of the triangles, or rotate the edges to fix this problem. Best to edit the mesh so those areas are polys/quads instead of long skinny triangles.
Maybe another dev has a better fix beyond editing the original models triangles/edges.

 

Best way I found is to export the fbx from Max with normals, tangents and binormals and bake in substance designer with the Unity presets (but no recalculation of tangents etc. no idea if that actually changes anything. )
Import in Unity also without recalculation of tangents/normals.
This is with one smoothing group for everything: Good enough for me and splittling the normals at steep angles would obviously lead to even better results. (Unity 5.0.1f1. I've seen a thread somewhere on here that might be a hint that they changed the tangent base with later patches, but since I can't and don't want to test that right now I can't confirm or deny that.)



I also tested handplane, which seemed ever so slightly worse, but still totally usable.