When I tried to bake the first time, I got a yellow result, so I figured: the normals are inverted. I flipped the normals, got a blue result but no geometry. So I flipped the grid 180 degrees and finally got blue geometry, but I’m not satisfied with the results. These are screenshots of the results, normal map, and bake properties.
Is there a better way or am I too picky with my results? I’d like to bake out proper normals so I can texture the floor with my own style instead of downloading textures from a site.
why so high a distance? move the plane closer to the thing you want to bake ( the beveled side) and make the distance not high. its currently looking for normal data 400 miles away
Didn’t know the distance was much of an issue when objects were further way. I might have misunderstood a tutorial I took at Blender Cookie where the tutor said to crank it up, he didn’t know the distance.
I tried lowering the distance with another floor tile I made, and there’s a slight difference, maybe I’m imagining things. I was quite subtle with the corner bevel this time.
Yet I did run into certain visual artifacts when I baked out normal and texture maps. The edges on my baked out textures are not very aligned if I zoom in, again maybe I’m being picky and that’s normal:
Bias is “offset” for the baking. You are telling to bake from this point, in Blender units.
Distance is how much further away from bias it should bake, in Blender units.
Default distance and offset is 0 and 0. To get the example situation baked, you would have to increase distance to at least 1.5 to get both domes baked. But in the example I’ve set the bias to 1.1, so distance 0.3 doesn’t include left dome and cuts the top off from the right one (left result). Distance of 0.4 includes top from left dome and almost everything from the right one (right result).
Best explanation on how distance and bias works, thanks! The tutorial I was taking never explained any of this, just said 1.00 for Bias was the magic bullet. A great tutorial nonetheless, but now I know what I’m doing when baking. Thanks again.
Bias is set to 1.1
When distance is set to 0.3, it cuts the top off from the right dome and doesn’t include left dome at all. This is the result on the left.
With distance is set to 0.4, tops from both domes are included. Result on the right.
Thanks for the updated response. Your explanation makes sense but I’m afraid there’s something I’m not getting or doing wrong. I tried baking another normal map, but unfortunately I get a piece of the geometry cut off. I don’t understand since the highest parts of the geometry are all the same, none of the beveled polygons are higher than another. I’ve moved the low polygon and the high planes closer and further to each other, same results. This is the normal map:
There is missing geometry between the horizontal lines and there’s not enough coverage on the image or the image is too low resolution for small detail to bake to.
I changed the UVs so that it takes more space on the image, and I put a 2048x2048 for them. You can move individual UV faces by enabling sync on the UV/image editor header and moving UV faces in UV face selection mode (ctrl+tab).
