Sorry if this is a wrong section to ask, but got a burning question to ask.
I’ve noticed that some video games have character “wrinkle maps” as normal maps, where the only details that are showing are the wrinkles, rest of the areas are blank 128 128 255 colors.
The question is that how is it possible in Blender to bake only those wrinkle details and leaving everything else out from the final baked texture, since you gotta sculpt those wrinkles onto the main high poly mesh where you have all of the other detail and obviously they would transfer onto the wrinkle map texture as you’re baking it. And when you’re applying that texture on the model, you’re essentially multiplying the same details twice, with the addition of the new creases.
Would be nice to know from someone more knowledgeable if there is a way to reproduce those sort of textures at home with Blender or if those textures are simply manually edited where the irrelevant information is painted out in Photoshop.
When you bake selected to active, you have 2 models one with and one without the details (wrinkles). The baking will bake the difference between the 2. Here I have 2 monkeys, on one of them I sculpted wrinkles, then I baked selected to active to make a normal map for the one that has no wrinkles. I could now apply that normal map to a low poly version of the monkey.
I guess the wrinkles are used as extra so the are proberly baked from a modifed high poly to unmodified version of the high poly to get only the “difference”… !?
Edit: …but @DNorman sepnt more time on the answer
