The image above is the tutorial on the Marmoset Toolbag site and the image below is the screen of Blender baking with Cycles.
However, let’s look at the results of the two tools.
In Blender, there is no bending of the normal near the edge of the cage, but all sides of the cage are seen to look like a 90 ° high polygon object and are baked together to the empty area.
What makes this difference, and how can it be baked correctly?
Thanks for reading.
normal mapping does not work as expected at any edges, in any program, unless you use fairly compute-intensive parralax shading maps. if you look at your first example, you will see the cubes are positioned at the best angle to give the illusion of depth, (none of the bolts extend beyond the edges of the cube), but the blender example is not at the same angle. also the blender example is trying to mimic extrusion beyond the plane of the basic cube. that is not possible. the only way to do that, with any program, is add extra faces.
basically, normal mapping is not a magic mesh generator. the illusion ends at the edges/faces. (unless you do some expensive alpha mapped texture tricks, which basically offset the compute savings of normal mapping in the first place)
