Normal map bake looks plain gray

So here’s the problem. I am trying to bake a normal map out of the high poly object to apply to the low poly object. The normal map ends up looking flat grey, without the data from the high poly object. I did a Google search and found someone else had this problem and fixed it by recalculating the normals to outside. I did this and it did not fix the problem.

Please ALWAYS supply a demo blend file for ALL support questions.

Note in your bake settings you have not enabled ‘selected to active’ option when baking your normal map so in effect you are baking zero different = no detail

Unless that’s a typo, you might want to talk to your ophtalmologist about color blindness (there’s a chance you might already have). Not kidding: The base color of a normal map is light blue - if that looks grey to you, there might be issues with your color vision.

As Richard says, please provide a .blend file.

That said, from your screenshot, it looks like you aren’t using “selected to active” when you bake, which is what you’re supposed to do when you’re baking a normal map from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly one.

  • Select the high-poly mesh
  • Shift-Select the low-poly mesh
  • Make sure “Selected to Active” is checked. You’ll probably want a little Extrusion depth as well (looks like you already have that)
  • Select the target image texture in your node setup
  • Bake