I was loosely following Blender Guru’s modelling tutorial, in that I was attempting to bake the details of the high-resolution version of my mesh onto the low-resolution version of my mesh. However, there were several errors that occurred during this process. As you can see on the low-resolution mesh (the first image), there are many unusually dark areas, as well as non blue and purple areas on the normal map. Changing the ray distance doesn’t help, as it will decrease the errors in some areas but they will increase in other areas. I don’t know what to do. Any help would be appreciated. I tried looking online and couldn’t find anything.
actually the ray distance seems to be your problem here… the object you’re carrying the data over from, from what I remember should be within/inside the target… this is why it doesn’t bounce back any detail really… But I am tossing this out on the fly without checking wether that is how I did it last time. I think ultimately you should go and fatten the target… try it this way and see wether it changes the outcome.
edit: or… imagine two mirrors (your faces) sitting on top of each other… the light rays don’t have enough room to gather and carry anything (it’s just blackness)… Pull them apart slightly and let there be light, and problem solved.
If changing ray distance fixes some errors (even though it creates others) then it suggests that there’s a lot of variability between your low poly and your high poly.
Especially since you’ve already baked these, I would try loading the normals baked at various ray depths into an image editor, layered, and just lasso out and delete the errors to reveal the alternate ray depth bake below. You should see that outside of the error areas, they give the same normals.
I tried that strategy actually, taking the normals map with the least amount of errors and putting another version below it and photoshoping the errors out. It actually didn’t help when I tried to apply it back onto my low-poly mesh. Maybe I did something wrong but I’m not sure. Any suggestions?
By “flatten the target”, I’m assuming you mean flatten or smooth out my low-poly mesh. And I’m not entirely sure what you meant in your edit, so I’ll try to explain it in my own words: You’re saying I need to increase the distance between my low and high poly mesh so that they don’t completely overlap each other in order to increase the distance the light rays can travel. Is this correct?
Feel like packing images and linking a .blend? I’d be happy to take a closer look.
That’s it!
…and yeah, it’s a typo, I meant “fatten” not flatten, haha.
You can use “shrink/fatten” tool to increase the distance on your target mesh.
I’d love to, but my file exceeds the limit
Okay, thanks! I’ll give it a try.