I cannot figure out how to bake normals in Blender reliably. I can bake normals and get a near perfect result, and then bake them again without changing any settings as far as I can tell, and get something horrendous and unusable.
I baked this normal map from HP to LP without using a cage:
Without changing anything that I’m aware of, I hit bake again, and immediately get this instead:
Obviously something is different, but it’s not anything I’m consciously changing. I’m baking using Cycles. I have the image texture active on the material, but it isn’t plugged into anything, so I don’t see how the normal map already existing could affect subsequent bakes. I just don’t get it, and it’s driving me nuts.
Rekov while I’m doing a combined bake I also have something changing. It’s as if the normals are flipping on me without any input on my part. And, it’s a bake very similar to about eight I have done with no problems in the past. In the same version of Blender I might add. Maybe six hours over several days attempting a bake I thought would be routine. Best of luck here.
Rekov for me ‘Load Factory Settings’ did it and not a minute to soon I might add. Damn I was a short walk from a rubber room. Don’t forget to reset your Cuda in User Preferences.
Thanks guys. I was definitely baking in tangent space, but it seems that for whatever reason it decides to bake in object space if there is already a baked normal in the texture file? Who knows…
