The title basically says it all, what I’m currently trying to do is to bake my high to low poly normals, but I want them to include the procedural normal textures that I have applied to my high poly model. Currently my model only appears to be baking the mesh normals, but it doesn’t include the normals from a steel and wood texture I have applied to it.
Any pointers? I’ve tried a lot of stuff including trying to combine normal maps, but it just ended up washing out my high to low poly normal.
That’s what I usually do, but won’t that cause more visible seems? What I thought would be the best way to do it would be to just apply the normal map textures to the high poly model and then just bake everything down to the LP, but that didn’t work sadly.
The reasoning for ‘Backing a Normal Map’ is so you don’t have huge amounts of geometry, this technique was done for video games, ‘backing’ is a geometry specific thing, it can not ‘read’ textures - it only reads ‘Normals’. As far as seams go, that is up to the user, or which method one uses to ‘un wrap’ the object(s).
I don’t know what the difference in geometry is between your high poly and low poly object is, I did look at your pic (knife) but its unclear which version it is, looks nice, so maybe high poly with textures.You can ‘Bake’ textures (minus the normal and bump maps, they have separate options) and apply that to your low poly object, you can also use a normal map generator that uses a pic to create a map(s), I use one from BYOB (LuxCoreRender developer) Free Normalmap Generator
You just have to pay attention to your settings (I think it makes them in reverse, but there is a check box to reverse it). Hope this helps, if not, post back and I will try to answer any questions I can.
I know why the high/low poly workflow was invented, but the fact that it can only bake mesh normals was new to me. I had my suspicion that this was the case, but I had hope. I’ve used normal/texture map generators before, but they usually give less satisfactory results than just doing it manually in Photoshop/Gimp.
Do you know if a displacement map might allow me to include the textures in the high/low poly bake? Just to clarify to everyone in this thread I know how to bake a regular high/low poly normal. Everything I want to do is to include my texture normals that I have on my high poly mesh in the baking process.
Ok shit update I think I’ve just thought of a solution. I’ll first export the diffuse textures, then I’ll convert them into a normal map and after that I’ll just overlay them on my normalmap in photoshop or gimp. That way I don’t get any annoying seams and I can get a good overlay.
Ok guys, I ultimately switched over to Blender 2.8+ which allows you to bake your procedural textures in your high to low poly normal map bake. Weird that there wasn’t any information about this online…
Most Blender plugins are made to make things easier, add some missing workflow, make things faster with less friction.
It’s sad Easy bake is not maintained.
Oh, I’m sorry. It works great in 2.81. But there are others. I think Bake Wrangler should be able to handle any situation. But it has always been better to run several versions of blender at the same time. I am very pleased that LTS versions are coming out now.
