Normal Map Baking produces strange results

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1

so, I’m relatively new to blender but not to the industry. I’m attempting to bake a normal map and I am able to bake a test file, but my sculpted model refuses to play nice (it produces a UV map with some normal map data but not much). perhaps someone has some ideas as to this. I tried all the settings I could think of but again, I am new to blender…

Screen Shot 2020-05-25 at 1.04.34 PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-25 at 1.04.34 PM5120×2544 1.54 MB

extremely lost… usually I can find an answer on the forums or YouTube or the manuals but this one has me stumped… thanks in advance for any help
=)

2

it looks like you’ve baked flipped normals, have you recalculated them?

3

yeah, I reset them then removed the UV map from “Object Data Properties” and created a new one and ran the smart UV without stretch (its good enough for this simple model). still no luck.

4

maybe share your file? https://pasteall.org/blend/

5

sure. its larger then 24mb so here is the cloud link AUTOBOT_LOGO_01

thanks a ton, was not expecting such a quick response, super grateful

7

not sure what you mean by flatten then unflatten. won’t that then miss the edge data? also not sure what’s overlapping specifically, here is the uv

did you set the margin to 0px (was at 16 by default I think), is this not the overlap setting?

UVmap_all_01
UVmap_all_014096×4096 1.07 MB

8

Sorry I was stupid about fatten, you just need to increase the Ray Distance. Yes your faces were overlapping, so it couldn’t bake properly, something like Ray Distance > 0.03 works, except as it is an object with angles you may need to paint a bit on the normal map in order to avoid some artifacts. Also the normal map seems a bit buggy. I’m going to dig a bit…

1

9

actually it is not buggy, your original object (called 1) is a bit shredded

10

thanks a ton for your help, trying the suggestions. changed the ray distance but nothing else but now the bake won’t pass 0%… changed it back and still 0%… pretty sure I broke something as it usually takes 3 seconds in the test files I downloaded/made myself, is there a way to reset the blender files preferences? just incase I messed something up while I was learning blenders sculpting tools
Screen Shot 2020-05-25 at 3.53.19 PM

11

what do you mean shredded?

12

I don’t know where your time could come from, actually I’ve appended your object into 2.79 because I feel more comfortable with it.

Shredded or jagged? (english is not my mother tongue)

2

13

Yes it doesn’t seem to work fine in my 2.8, whatever Ray Distance I choose, weird :confused:

14

ah, I understand the meaning of shredded now, yeah, its meant to look “war like”.

lots of the info out there for Blender is for pre-2.8, makes this harder for all I guess.

yeah, I think I will export the individual geometry data to obj and load them into a new blend file and see if it works, hope so

super big help to know I’m not going crazy and missing something simple :slight_smile: thanks a ton

15

I hope someone will tell if we miss something in 2.8 or if it’s just a bug. I guess it’s always good to keep another version of Blender to give a test…

16

Ooh ok you chose Space > Object instead of Tangent (Tangent is the default setting), seems to change a lot. I don’t know the difference. Anyway, it needs a bit of rework.

17

object bakes and does nothing, maybe a bug, shame.

I was able to get to this (good enough, I can fix it in PS)

Screen Shot 2020-05-25 at 4.40.02 PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-25 at 4.40.02 PM2448×2448 740 KB

thanks for all the help, this program is great, but coming from Maya its a grind. I’ll get there, thanks again.

18

edit: ok the result is better but still not the same as 2.7

19

Very interesting. I could not get a decent bake out of it. No matter what setting…

For baking i normally use the textool addon that can do it all for you. Weird enough the addon didnt work in 2.82 and i dont have 2.81 on my system… but i can recommend textool for baking and uv stuff.