I've been working on a TF2 item and I'm nearly done with the low-poly but one thing that's preventing me from finishing it are these smoothing errors. The areas of the helmet shell that are chamfered are making hard edges in the smoothing when I want it to be a smooth surface all over.

Here's the areas I'm talking about.



Here's a wireframe.



Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? I've tried moving the outer vertices to make it more of a flat surface but it doesn't work everywhere. Would redoing this area to not use such long thin triangles fix it?

Yes, get rid of the long triangles. That will fix the problem!

I'm not exactly sure how to do that though. If I target weld to surrounding vertices it will mess up the shape when looking from the front and leaving them as quads would still have the problem I think. I'll mess around with it and see what results I can get though.

Long triangles have nothing to do with the problem here .. see you have longer triangles and they end up perfectly fine.
If anything, it might be the clusters (high distribution of edges ending in one vert)

You can play around with the edges, rebake and see if it fixes it.
For example in the image below, I just spin the edge to take the tension out of the verts.

But to be honest there's something dodgy here ... it might be anything from the baking cage to improper use of smoothing groups ... that's one of the reasons I use xnormal instead of max these days for baking.

I suggest using high specularity material to test for smoothing errors.
Also be prepared results are rarely 100% perfect, but might be good enough to work around them. (once you have a diffuse/specular textures, it usually hides minor issues)

I got the smoothing errors to be less noticeable by making the triangles a bit wider. You can still see them at a few angles but it's barely noticeable and while playing the game you aren't going to see it and go "Hey, that helmet has smoothing errors on it!" Anyway no baking is required because I'm not even using a normal map on this. Besides the fact that I've never even baked a normal map from a high poly model, it's just a hat for TF2 and doesn't require a normal map.

Thanks for the help! I'll keep that technique in mind next time I run into this problem Chai.

hehehe no normalmaps ! I knew something looked wrong here ;)

Glad to hear you sorted out the problem Zipfinator