I am having an issue with baking and am not sure if blender can even do the task

My issue is with blender cycles baking i have created a simple procedural displacement for leather.



now my goal is to bake this material onto a png or any format image without the lighting information or shadows… I’ve tried all types of configurations in the bake tab but have not come up with a single decent result.

pls help :slight_smile:

From your screenshot, one can see that you’re not really using a procedural ‘displacement’, but a procedural ‘normal’ map…

For baking normal maps in Cycles, you need some workaround. Currently the NormalMap baking only works from Hires to Lowres, and it doesn’t take shader info into consideration.

I’ve made a nodegroup for doing that… you can read about it here. And recently I’ve converted that nodegroup into a more functional Python node, that you can find in my ExtraNodes addon (note that it’s still in development process, but the NormalBake node is working)

I have recreated your node group and am baking it now but i saw in the material view all that needed to be seen thank you so much for your help your a doll… this has been puzzling me for a few days but now… how did you figure this out ( warning i haven’t taken trig or computer graphics courses just a self taught simpleton )

I’ve no academic background in math either, as I studied arts… but working with 3D for quite a while, we start to know what normals are, how normals maps are encoded, reading the papers where those technics were suggested, consulting some math books, making a script for this, a script for that… after a while it all starts to make more sense. I know math books can be very intimidating, and normally not very well illustrated also… It took me some time, for example, to understand what we could do with vectors… before that, I couldn’t just ‘see’ what was going on.

The trully sugestion is to have fun learning it, be curious… You won’t learn it if you don’t enjoy it. :wink:

thanks for the advice also it works like a dream just gotta change where the seams are on my model now. ( there are some errors appearing on the gloss now but overall a step in the right direction ) you should submit this information to the blender developers through irc or something this needs to be a standard in blender thank you so much for all the help