It’s my first time trying to back a normal map and all I get is a purple void (and occasionally, a yellow band appears).
I have a kind of looking like a tatami mesh. (which I’ve attempted to create in two ways, with array of subdivided cubes, or with an array of curved planes, I am not sure which is less worse lol).
Then I follow the steps of “how to bake from high poly to low poly/ how to bake normal maps in blender” type of tutorials to try to bake into a plan (I also tried on a similar looking cube) but it either gives the purple result or purple with one yellow line.
I was wondering if this problem would be linked to a bad uv unwrapping (also a beginner in those lol), a forgetten settings somewhere, or more fundamentally that the generate normal maps methods can not be applied to this type of mesh? (though I saw people generating normal maps from human’s heads so I am guessing one should be able to do it with anything?)
Also i read in one tutorial this
Once the system is set up for baking; in the 3D View make sure both high and low resolution meshes are positioned coincidentally, that they occupy the same space.
That surprised me a bit, does it really changes anything if the objects are close together or not?
Using nodes or gimp to generate a normal map would probably be better alternatives right? But I am still interesting in knowing why I am not getting any results at all with my current attempts
Thank you for your attention,
I hope you have a good day
I don’t understand the situation
There is also a simple way to extract normal images from the plane.
The case bake uses the same type of object.
High Poly Low Poly are all in the same shape, and the cage copies the low poly and wraps it a little larger than the High Poly.
Your file is fine, but I’m not sure why the objects were not aligned,so . . .
There are a number of key points:
The low poly mesh needs to be as close to the hi poly as possible, and ‘above’ it.
Baking works by firing rays out of the back of the low-poly models faces until they hit a surface ( the Hi-poly mesh hopefully ).
The resolution of the image map you are baking , in this particular case, will need to be at least 2048x2048 because the narrowest an ‘edge’ can be is the width of one pixel and you have a lot of parallel edges very close together. [ I think that even this may be too low and you’ll need 4096x4096 if you plan to get close to it. ]
Be sure to set the texture to NON-Color BEFORE you bake:
You have sensibly added bevelled edges to your ‘grooves’, this is critical when trying to capture recesses because normal maps only store angular information, they know nothing of ‘depth’. If the edge are perfectly straight ( ie they are at 90° to the main surface) then no ray fired from the low-poly mesh can hit them and therefore wont registered - the result … a blank normal map.
Be sure to reset the scale of the low-poly mesh ( ALT-A apply scale ) and then UV Unwrap it or the uv space will be distorted and the baking won’t look like you expect.
