I know about detaching faces, or changing the smoothing angle (in maya) but ive tried detaching the faces when baking normal maps in modo as a test, changing the smoothing angles, no matter what i still get wrong restults when baking normal maps. in maya, i can just change the normal angle and have no problem.

ive looked for the past hour online for a solution to this in modo, but i can find nothing. anyone dealt with doing hard surface normal map creation in modo? looking for a tutorial or...oy, just something so i can properly bake hard surfaces in modo.

i'd hate to have to export my entire scene to maya, then change all the normals in there, then bake in xnormal. that looks like my only option right now...

Have a look at this, I think it will help.

Normalmaps for the Technical Game Modeler

ive seen that thread, i dont know how much of it applies to modo since i cant adjust edge normals or anything.

I think it's not possible to bake this type of thing properly in Modo since there is no cage baking available

See Normal Maps: Can Somone Explain This "Black Edge" issue

The good news is that xNormal does support cage baking and there is a xNormal exporter for Modo written by Chai which does support proper vertex normals.

what did you made exactly...it seems you have wrong smooth groups...you need to split the faces in UV map and put the 89,9 degree smooth to the base material...

modo dont have uv cages but you can set distance as 1 or 2

modo sometimes goes nuts...you can open a whole new scene and copy/paste your models on it without tick the materials etc...it may be solve the problem....

you have to select edges and manualy split them.
also you will have better results if the lowpoly is inside the hp.
modo is weird

Also, I find there's a bug in my modo viewports that makes normal maps display at 200% strength (the actual bake is fine, it's just the display in the viewport). Setting the normal map's layer opacity to 50% fixes it.