Sadly, MikkT tangent basis open source (!!!) code has never been implemented by Autodesk neither in Max nor in Maya. So in terms of compatibility with game engines, Substance remains the best method there is.

From what I understand, cages are the same thing as averaged normals. I had to use extra geo at the edges of my model to prevent floaters and detail geo from my high-poly from getting skewed in the low-poly. This was in 3ds Max but I've heard that importing your cages into Substance Painter will give the same results. It's still averaging the normals based on the cage and will skew your high-poly detail.

Cages don't make any difference anymore in Substance or XNormals : forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,1842.msg8368/highlight,bake+cage.html#msg8368 Baking evolved and most 3D Softs slowly follow.

If you use only one smoothing group, especially with hard surface models, your details will always be skewed whether you bake with average normals or not. So you need smoothing groups on the low poly, two bakes, one to define the edges, one to get non skewed high poly details.

Thanks Scott, I hope it's useful!

+Nick Quackenbush When I set soften edge. It look so weird. I tried so hard to get like your result but It was really difficult . I tried many way as possible as I can to get perfect baking but I have to learn more. Thank you very for you answer me a question ps . apologized for my English Grammar. RIP

Nick Quackenbush I also liked the procedural textures that you can change with nodes. I just need to learn how to use nodes first :p Thanks for the help

Every baker has these issues, Substance is the only thing that has a quick and easy fix that lets you get the best of both worlds, and quickly.

I believe this is the best method so far. I just talked (04/19/2017) with a dev at Allegorithmic. They're working on a solution to get clean edges and non skewed details in one baking operation. But for the moment the mnethod described here is the best baking option you can get. And going through Substance Designer seems to be the best : there's a way to do something similar in Painter but as there isn't an "edge detect" equivalent it's a bit of a pain.

+Nick Quackenbush Thank u for answer It was problem with parameter Absolute of my SVG map

+Nick Quackenbush Are u always use this technik , or maybe it dosent work somtimes ?

+Nick Quackenbush Ah yeah that's as I thought. Tried this method out last night and it worked real nice, virtually identical result to Xnormal but without the cage! Thanks Nick.

Ahhhhh perfect. THanks for the fast response!

+Nick Quackenbush Can you adjust masks without chamfer? I mean: what if you export the mask from SD (the same mask baked without chamfer) and import that in photoshop, then put a "black rectangle" alias "patch" on uv location of the 3 indentions? Or even better directly inside SD (maybe using the "pencil" strument?) ? Maybe too rogue; but maybe is even more fast if you need a very quick fix. Just brainstorming mixed with curiosity and ignorance: still a total noob with SD because I put my spare time on SP too much :p , oh and sorry for my crappy english.

AO depends on normal, like mostly everything else. So if you bake your normals properly and blend average + non average normals as described here, you just go on baking your AO and they'll look perfect.

Absolutely! Have to look into that once I get out of the substance children's play area. Haven't had the time to look into if there are any ways of scripting in SD, whatever the case, I'll definitely work this into my pipeline for personal projects!