I'm hoping someone with a bit of modelling experience can help me here, as I just can't see what's going on.

I've created a simple model in Blender, but I just can't seem to get the normal map to work properly. Here's my first picture: http://i569.photobucket.com/albums/ss132/JW1a/ScreenShot661-1.jpg. As you can see, I somehow managed to get the main part of the base, marked A, working ok, but the rest ( marked B ) has all kinds of odd shading problems. As for the http://i569.photobucket.com/albums/ss132/JW1a/ScreenShot662.jpg, you can see that basically the normals are back-to-front.

Now, I've tried various combinations of flipping the normals and using 'recalculate outside' on both the high-poly and low-poly models, but the result is the same. Does anyone have a clue what's causing this - and, more importantly, how to fix it!?

Oi, I'm not particularly knowledgeable, so this is just an idea, could it just be a matter of using faces > set smooth?

Thanks, I tried that and it made a slight difference; however, it did lead me, indirectly, to find the real cause: my ignorance of how Blender works! It turns out, unbeknownst to me, that the 'extrude' function duplicates verticies - so my model wasn't so much a model as a collection of disconnected faces! Once I merged the verticies together I got a result about a hundred times http://i569.photobucket.com/albums/ss132/JW1a/ScreenShot780.jpg

Cool. Those trophies look good!