So I’ve got a scene which consists of multiple objects, textures etc. I have a camera placed isometrically and have rendered the scene. Now what I want is a normal map of the same image i.e. a normal map of the scene from the camera.
The plan is to use this with some custom magic to combine the rendered image and a dynamic light to provide dynamic lighting of my 2d image.
The problem is … I can;t get blender to generate one. I’ve tried baking and all I get is “no valid images to bake to”. I’ve created an image in the UV editor which is the same res as the render and then tried again but all that happens is I get no error, and no normal map.
As I understand it, normal map baking is used for textures that are applied to specific objects: you have a lo-poly object and a high-poly object, and Blender “bakes” the subtleties of the high-poly onto the lo-poly in the form of a normal map.
I’m sure someone out there knows this better than I do; I’ve seen instances where you use a single, non-specular neutral material for everything in the scene (which you can do in the render properties in the layers section) and then put in colored lights to simulate the projected light of a normal map. I believe there are even plugins for After Effects created to do “lighting” tricks with such renders. More than that, however, I can’t help you. If no one else has ideas, please let us know how you solved the problem!