I have been able to bake each piece of my mesh without having to tinker with the Bake settings, however, once I got to the larger part of the mesh there were issues present: prominent gradients of yellow and green that appear on certain parts of the normal map, same area each attempt.
I am to understand the issue has to do with my low-poly and high-poly meshes clipping (though I can’t say I’m one-hundred percent certain), but after messing with both the Extrusion, Max Ray Distance, and Margin settings I haven’t gotten a clean, functional normal map.
I’m really at a loss on how to fix this, I even attempted to fix the issue in Photoshop but the results ended up being sloppy and the work-around was tedious. I’ve searched online for a few hours and found similar issues, though when I applied the answers to my own project their solutions didn’t fix my problem.
If anyone has an answer, I’d greatly appreciate your help!
I’ve had similar problems with recent versions. I suggest tweaking the cage values as much as you can, and lowering the strength, then adding the lost value by increasing the strength of the normal map once loaded as a material.
Looking at your baked image, I’d guess it’s happening because you’re using an automatic cage and not a custom one. (It tries displacing the mesh along its normals, but in your case the sharp angles in the breast and buttocks areas cause the cage mesh to overlap itself, shooting its rays in the wrong direction) .
To fix this, I’d try using a custom cage, which is basically a duplicate of your mesh with a displace modifier on top of it with a small value (just enough to cover your high poly mesh), which is limited by a vertex group with lower weights at those crease areas to prevent this overlap from happening.
To clarify- you need to enable “cage” and then select your custom cage object in the “cage object” field. The cage object should be a a duplicate of your lowpoly mesh with its faces pushed out to completely encompass the highpoly mesh (with some extra care in those creased areas).
Make sure “selected to active” is checked, and that you have your original lowpoly as the active object (orange outline), and the highpoly as the selected object (yellow outline), and it should bake properly.
