No color variation when Baking Displacement and Normal Maps

I’m trying to bake a Displacement map but the map looks flat grey. This can’t be right. When I bake the normal map it also looks flat blue with no variation like I’ve seen in other normal maps. I have a lamp in the scene.

Why isn’t there any darks and lights in the maps?:confused:

http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/3879/bakingmonkey.jpg

Looks like you don’t have a low poly model so you can bake the difference between the high and low resolution.
The lamps have nothing to do with baking the displacement or normal maps.
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/06/30/normal_maps_blender_2_5/
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/08/30/retopology-and-normal/

I used a low poly model of Suzanne then just added a “multi-resolution” modifier then sculpted. What do I need to do to bake the difference between the high and low resolution? I watched a tutorial on CGCookie, but it was very difficult to understand how he did this. Please explain!

pg

This is how I have done it in the past, and continue to do it, since it works real nice.

  1. Duplicate your high poly mesh (hopefully the multires is still in a modifier state) and make sure it occupies the same space as the original
  2. Lower the multires on the new object to a lower poly count (now you have a low poly version that follows the high poly contours closely)
  3. Freeze the low poly mesh by applying the multires
  4. After creating a new UV map by unwrapping the low poly mesh and choosing new for the map and setting dimensions for the map, select the high poly then the low poly and bake the normal to active (this will bake the high poly to the low poly UV since the last object you chose is now the active object.)
  5. And now you have a new map to save and apply.

There may be some subtle steps that I am missing, but I have used this method many times, especially on complex surfaces like bones.


Still working on details with this one, but for a distance shot, it’s not bad. This just shows that I started with a very low poly model, then scupted the high poly model and actually reduced the high poly to the final low poly version. After that I baked the 745k poly model to the 3k model for both AO and Normal.

In the outliner you only have one object called Monkey. You need two separate objects, one low poly and one high poly. You bake the difference between these two objects to create the normal or displacement maps.