Normal Map Help

Hello!
This is my first attempt to bake normal maps and I think I’m doing everything right, but the output is a mess.

So, I’m trying to bake the normals from this mesh:



To this mesh:

The detailed mesh was sculpted from the base mesh with multires. There was also a mirror modifyer which probably accounts for some of the pinching in the chest, but I think there’s something more fundamental wrong here.

Heres the Normal Map I get:


the normal map is all full of holes. I’m guessing this is a geometry issue with my detail mesh.
I’ll try to give more details in the next post.

You probably should show how UVs look laid on problem areas. Could be that there is some overlap going on due to too large bleed margins.
Waist and chest areas could have mesh issues too, likely.
Depending on how UVs look you could do something like this to get more of UV space

Maybe share blend file if you can?

I think I’m on the path to figuring it out, but I have a few questions.
Some more shots of the issue:



The pinching on the chest I’m sure is due to some faces that were curled inside. But I’m not sure about the weird seam on the arm. The normals seem to reverse there. Could it be related to the fact that I marked my seams before applying the mirror modifier? Or could it be that the islands are laid out sideways? The shadows are all crazy too.


Rendered shot. I can see that the normal map is doing “something”, but It’s not really deforming the mesh as much as I hoped.

I’ve been doing some work to clean up the models. First thing was to remove the double faces and retopologize the seam. Just finished that this this morning, so I’ll work at getting an update later on today.

One big question:
Does the target mesh actually need to fully encase the source mesh? Because my target is actually inside the detailed mesh in many places.
I am creating a new retopologized mesh around this model, anyway so maybe this solves the problem?

As for uploading the .blend… It’s well over 150MB right now, so I think I’d probably have to extract these models to a new file to be able to upload it here.

When you apply a normal map you need to enable the normal map checkbox in the image sampling settings under the texture properties tab.



Then when you scroll down to the influence settings under geometry enable normal.


As for the holes in your normal map, that is either holes in the uvs or in your mesh thats causing it. Might be mirror modifier after subsurf or multires with subdivide uvs enabled. I’m not sure though…

Some more points to note:

  1. Fix your mesh! That seam in the middle shouldn’t be there.
  2. Why is your normal map background black? It should be 8080FF. Don’t forget to uncheck ‘Use Alpha’ when you create an image for baking.
  3. Yes, the low-poly should closely follow the high-poly mesh. There can be some intersections, some parts inside, some parts outside, but the less the difference - the better.

Meant to post this the other day, I think I got the hang of it.
Had to resculpt and do a complete retopo (first time for that too).
Thanks for all the help!