It could have been worse.

I just discovered that Blender Cycle doesn’t like models with edited normals, and as it turns out it’s also not what I used on the headcage (but I thought…) so I made a kind of compromise by rendering it twice, and mixing the two diffuse maps.

The headcage material doesn’t work too well on its own on something that doesn’t have a lot of surface detail, and the normal map doesn’t bake properly with the new material, but mixing both gives me a relatively “nice” result.

I gotta make the final set of UVs now.