I am trying to bake a normal map, to generate the texture of a sculpted mane into a lowpoly mane, but it is not working, it either gives me a flat blue color, both in non color or RGB mode, i think I tried everything I could and still couldn’t bake it into that lowpoly model, i need help.
I am using blender 3.6.23 and the screenshot was not my final atempt, I messed up everything I could, flip faces, flip normals, scale up and down, aply scales, aply rotates, aply modifiers, change uvs, use a png, bake it differently, activate and desactivating the smooth shading, everything I could try I tried, nothing is giving me the result I need…
It’s failing because of the max ray distance setting, it’s preventing the bake from seeing anything because it’s too short. Set it to 0 (deactivated/unlimited distance), it’s not needed in this situation.
The way baking works is this:
First, the “extrusion” setting is used. The low-poly model is inflated outward so it’s outside of the high poly and is clear of all its details.
Then, rays are shot inward until they hit the high poly model. The max ray distance limits this (can be useful if there are holes in the high poly mesh and you don’t want the bake to see the wrong side).
If the max ray distance is smaller than the extrusion, you will capture nothing, the rays won’t reach the high poly model (well, except maybe for the very tip of the highest peaks if they are long enough to be in range).
