I have a problem baking the displacement into a normal map. I am not even sure, if it is even intended to do this way though.
What I do:
unwrap the object using UV Smart Project
use a procedural texture for the displacement (if bump, true, both makes no difference for my problem)
bake using type “normal”
now I have as expexted a normal map based on the displacement. The problem however is, that the coordinates seem to be of.
Or at least the seams are visible on the object, if I use the normal map.
Am I doing something wrong?
Normal map should be set to Non-Color Data in the Image Texture node options and plugged into surface shader (Diffuse BSDF in the screenshot above).
As to seams - they always be visible on the image of normal map itself, that’s how it works. However when rendered they should disappear.
I kept digging for the root cause of this, so I found out that the same kind of visible seam problem occurs when baking the diffuse color. So it is not a normal map problem.
I used an icosphere so far to test it. However the problem is not there if you use uv spheres or round cubes. So it probably has to do with triangles.
Edit: Damn, no I was wrong. There is still a seam visible when baking
To be clear, this is the problem:
Baking procedural texture, then for the resulting image as color input the seams are visible. No matter what you bake.
Island margin is used at unwrap
Taking a ridiculous high resolution texture will fix those seam artifacts.
So to sum it up:
My initial question why the normal map looks strange after baking is solved as this indeed doesn’t affect the rendering.
As I wanted to get sure about this I zoomed onto the seam and saw that there is this artifact.
That one actually is a bleeding problem and can only (next to set a margin) be solved by taking a really high resolution texture. As for the sphere it disappeared at a 4k texture.
