Hi,
I followed your tutorial, step by step. Using Blender 2.49 and I can not repeat the results.
I use multires to get more res on the Monkey and sculpt some changes. Follow all your steps as laid out and am not getting the same results.
Please help.
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS!
Everyone I’ve found didn’t work for me but this one did. (I didn’t know you had to save the image and you said that) so this was a very clear easy to follow tutorial!
Thanks for the feedback everyone and also to those who have helped by answering peoples questions; there are many things which are similar in Blender so “clear” instructions can still be confusing.
banditkills: Try applying the final sculpted monkey multires. Otherwise, subdivision or multires (whichever you use) may be only a “temporary illusion” resulting in your actual hi-res model still being low res and therefore little or no difference when mapped against the low-res version.
Thanks for making that short n sweet, had read a few tuts n you tube for this topic but always ended up confuzed.
this is gonna save me so much time now i know how simple n fast it is to set up
Nice tutorial, I have one crit though…there are a couple of tiny regions where it looks like the normals didn’t get baked. This can be easily fixed by increasing the ‘distance’ value slightly before baking.
Thanks for the tutorial. It is nice and concise for when you have to consult it while doing it yourself. Some tips I didn’t know either.
@ Lancer
i think i found a way of doing a normal with some nodes mat but with no UV
this would normal mapping only not with UV editor
i mean it may not be as good as with baking but seems to work faster i think
have you seen this way of doing a normla map with mat nodes
happy blendering
YOU ROCK! This tutorial really helped me out alot when I was modeling objects for my game!
Thanks again, glad the tutorial is useful.
RickyBlender I don’t quite follow you mean… it sounds like you’re pumping procedural textures through the normals? Yes, very possible though with a full UV map you can get specific details whereas procedurals tend to be very uniform. Other than that… I’m not entirely sure what you mean.
Using the above tutorial, you can be limited to the resolution of your sculpt tool which isn’t really tremendously high. For ultra high detail, you can use 2D applications like the Photoshop nvidia plugin or the Gimp normal mapping one which converts greyscale bump into normal map, so you can literally paint on cracks and wrinkles in ultra high definition… I’ve been thinking of making a part 2 tutorial on this next level once I get a bit of free time.
…then again, I understand normal mapping techniques are one of the key targets for Blender overhauling in the Durian project. Hopefully lots of ZBrush-esque extras yet to come. Imagine if the devs made it so that the sculpting tool could literally paint straight to tangent normals? Alternatively, having a node filter to convert greyscale bumpmap to normals within Blender could also be very useful… maybe also a plugin to convert normals into displacement geometry and back again? (dreams…) 
i have a question ?
can I bake a texture the same way??
you have your low poly mesh with your normal map and now you want it to have the same look like the high poly mesh (materials to texture)
is it possible? i haven’t tried because i have to finish my low poly model first :o but it would be cool because you can bake the two maps right after another and use it for games etc.
well done You did a great job. this Tut help’s me alot in my studies:)
Thank you so much for this. I’ve been pulling my fair trying to figure this out, now thanks to your simple, yet precise tutorial I was finally able to crate a working normal map.
Really, I can’t thank you enough.
Alex.
I’m having an issue, I’ve tried following your tutorial as close as I can but I’m getting a weird effect. Here’s the render on a simple ball that I used instead of a monkey
Here’s the simple normal map.
[EDIT] Ha! I think I know what I was doing, nevermind
Am I just really wrong here or can you not bake maps in 2.5? I really hope that I am wrong because that sounds insane :eek:
Hi NinthJake, so I take it you had no problem with 2.49?
Yes, this does work for 2.5 but the interface has changed so you need to make sure you’re hitting the right settings… some in 2.5 are similar but not always the same thing.
2.5 settings for the bake should look like this:
A very common issue people seem to have problems with: check that you save the UV map before and after baking.
I would really like to make another tutorial for this on 2.5 soon. For now, I am slightly behind on a publishing contract on a Blender book (they are being mean to me :(), so I kind of have my hands tied and, obviously, I don’t want to hurt any copyrights by simply duplicating the to-be-published content straight up here (I’d at least have to reword things a bit). So maybe a bit later?
Until then, check the above settings; hope they help you.
Thank you for that Lancer. I haven’t tried it with 2.49 yet, it’s just that I searched for a tutorial on how to do it in 2.5 and found none and then I heard some rumors that it was not possible to do it in 2.5, hence why I asked.
But now I know that it is possible so thank you