Hello everyone,
I am sort of new to the whole normal maps baking so please bare with me. Until now I only ever did it in Substance, but I am giving a try to Blender.
My reason to bake normal maps is to use less polygons in a low poly mesh to reduce the amount of polygons and improve the performance of my assets. For that I simply tested a couple of ways to bake Normal maps.
I checked if the UV map in the High poly made any difference but it didn’t.
I UV mapped the Low poly. It only has 4 polygons. I tested it with many more polygons but I saw no difference. Originally I let some of the add-ons to autogenerate the UVs but the UV I created gave me better results so I used that one for all the tests.
I baked the normal maps in Non-color space. That gave me the best results. I tested Linear because I read somewhere that is was the same. I stuck wit Non-color.
I tested every single value of bias and ray distance and I didn’t see much of a difference, except if the extrude was of course too small and then you see geometry truncated.
I checked if baking it in 32 bits and exr would make a difference, but it didn’t improve the problem.
I also checked with a higher resolution but also so no significant improvement there.
I checked if there was any difference with smoothing the faces or selecting autosmooth but also no difference.
I applied all the transformation, merged vertices, erased duplicates, and check my normals, just to make sure that there was nothing wrong with the High Poly Mesh.
The size of the plane is the default size you get in blender 2x2m and the extrusions are about 0.035m
I got the same results baking with Bake Tool, Bake wrangler and Blender itself.
Obviously if I am doing something wrong, I am the one doing the mistake in each of the methods.
What I don’t know is if I am wrong and it is indeed suppose to look this flat.
I would really appreciate any help.
I have been trying to get better results for a week and nothing gets better.
I have been learning blender for 3 weeks, so I really don’t know if I am missing something too obvious.
Thanks in advance for any help
This is a wetransfer link with all the files that I imagine will only last a week, but I’ll update it
What exactly are you expecting? Normal maps don’t result in actual depth because they’re just normals. They’re vectors that describe the orientation of a pixel to provide a reasonable illusion of additional high frequency surface detail, but ultimately it’s still just an illusion and won’t hold up to intense scrutiny.
It’s called a rhetorical question.
I thought that clear from how I went on the explain why a normal map can’t have depth and offered a good resource to read up on what to expect from a normal map.
To clarify, @POstudio , you are expecting too much of normal maps. In blender, you want to look into displacement mapping.
Other programs have support for parallax mapping (substance does this, as do most modern game engines) which is another way to fake depth that often works in conjunction with normal mapping.
thank you guys, I think you answered my question. I have seen tutorials where the artist bakes screws and floaters and they do look like more accurate than the results I got.
But if you tell me that that is all the normal maps can do, then I will considered the topic resolved
You are expecting too much from normal map, it doesn’t create additional geometry, it creates illusion of depth on existing geometry with lightning which best viewed directly and with more angle you look at it the more flaw it will look.
By the way guys, if anyone has the same silly question I had, I got an answer from another source that was quite interesting. They recommended to check Parallax mapping since that explains much better what I though I could achieve with normal maps: https://apoorvaj.io/exploring-bump-mapping-with-webgl/
Your question wasn’t silly. But i think it lacks one important point:
What for are your assets (usage and application)? and
What do you wanna gain in respect to polygons ratio/ saving/ economy?
The usual tricks to fake some details and having less polygons are known here in the forum but we don’t know the circumstances you are dealing with… or you pecise target. As already noted by:
Even used in blender 10 years ago Parallax mapping for Blender Render / Cycles? - #13 by Binary and there are others… using it to render building interoirs for example (one quad no intern geometry)… So baking a displacement map is possible and viewable in blender (and needed for/used by the parallax render process) But another thing is:
You already used Substance… and now wanna try Blender (with different addons) …
And our results in Substance were better? The info you give here are somekind of missleading. So the question about you expectations was appropriate. One would suppose you know this reason/benefit and disadvantage of using bump maps and normalmaps for bumping, normal light faking, paralax render or even geometry shader…
(Anyway: if the postings answered your question then mark it solved.)
I need the asset to work for AR and WebGl and for that I need to reduce the number of polygons substantially. I kind of hate all those webgl games that look blurry, or the ambient occlusion is way to exagerated so I was hoping that by baking maps I could improve that.
The tests I did in Substance were about 2 years ago and I can only remember I had good results, but I can’t compare the exact experiment right now. It might have been exactly the same result
I didn’t know about marking it solve. I’ll get to it.sorry about that. I don’t participate in that many forums
