Problem: When baking normals, from High Poly to Low Poly model, baked normals are coming out as transparent.
Did some research on internet, seems like it is a Cycles bug.
Yesterday I was baking normals and it was fine. Today, I opened same file and tried baking it again(because I forgot to save images) and instead of any data in image, all normals are transparent.
Iâm dum dum. Had collection render visibility off but object inside of that collection on.
Still it is wierd, baked normals were transparent even on new blend file with only those two objects. Perhaps it was because high poly object didnât have any material assigned.
If youâre just baking âNormalsâ, that wouldnât change anything and it would bake correctly (unless your settings in the âExtrusionâ and âMax Ray Distanceâ are incorrect).
Another option that I sometimes do (thought, not allways), is to add an high subdivision to the lowres object, then shrinkwrap it against the highres, and bake the âObject Normalsâ (without the âselected to activeâ)⌠Then I just convert from Object to Tangent in a separate bake, which is fairly fast.
I was using Shrinkwrap to get rid of some wierd corners on low poly model, really useful and doesnât mess up topology that much.
What do you mean by
I had extrusion on 0.02 or 0.05 with Max Ray Distance on 0. Are those settings correct?
Like I mentioned before, it is wierd that normals were coming out transparent even on brand new blend file with appended meshes(not collections or objects, pure meshes). Either I was doing x right and forgot about y one time and done opposite another time.
It will depend on the objects you have. (the same goes if you have a cage)
Normally, a transparent result means âNo Hitâ⌠which might be from a range of factors, but in your case, itâs most probably the âMax Ray Distanceâ that is too small.
Note that if you extrude 0.02, and have a ray distance of 0.05, it means that only parts of the hires surface that are at a distance less than 0.03 from the lowres surface, will be hitted by the trace function.
(I havenât seen your scene, so you need to check these distances yourself)
Here is almost exact setup for baking, only image texture is connected to other nodes, when baking had it âlooseâ. White is High Poly, Brownish is Low Poly. And with those settings I baked normally.
And of course had rendering disabled for HP in collections tab, which seems to be the issue(baked normals just fine yesterday)
Again, the âExtrusionâ and the âMax Ray Distanceâ just depend on your objects, more in particular, in the dimensions of your objects⌠if those heads (both hires and lores) are around 0.2 blender units in size, your âMax Ray Distanceâ will probably work correctly.
But if their dimensions are 10 BUs, than most of the rays will miss, because 0.03 is not enough.
