First of, you need to move your mapping a bit out of sides. Generally it is a good practice to leave a bit of space between the mapping and the mapping boarders.
Now instead of flipping the mapping itself, maybe you should try to flip green of the normal map?
When you bake normal maps you need to ensure that both objects have reset scale (ie. in max 100, 100, 100).
That's at least what I do (besides the flipping green) and it works for me just fine :)
Last edited Jan 08, 2013 by Leruster
Zolden AuthorI'v been using normal maps for some time, and been always noticing something strange in the look of the models. They looked ok, but something wasn't right in their light reflections. Finally, I've decided to find out, what exactly is going on. And didn't like what I've found. Hope someone will help with it. There is a little illustration of the problem.
Let's create a box
Unwarp UVW's the natural possible way, as a box
And create a high-poly version of the box in purpose to generate a normal map
After some routine manipulations we have a natural looking normal map.
And we expect to see a nice looking box with soften light reflections. But by a strange reason, our expectations proved to be wrong. Some of the sides look pushed, and some - popped.
Ok then, let's flip some faces at UV-space.
Now all sides are popped, but still, this look weired and requires more flipping to make it look all right.
So, the question is: what is the source of this issue? What do I do wrong. And how to make it work right? We can flip sides in this simple case, because sides are orthogonal, but it's not a solution at all, it won't work with anything but a cube.