UV bake is really messed up

I am trying to bake a normal map. But something very weird is happening. When I bake, it seems to ignore the sculpted detail on the high-poly mesh, but seemingly trying to bake the shape of the high-poly mesh onto the map. I don’t quite know how to put this all to words though. Ehh… Like, maybe something is up with the UV layer…?

So, this is the picture of the low poly-mesh, and its unwrapped form. And, this is the messy unwrap on the high-poly object. Here’s what happens when I try to bake it. I only unwrapped the high-poly mesh to show what was happening. I am new to blender, and probably just missed something obvious. Thanks everyone for your continued support to us noob people!
Ok, So I tried selecting things in the wrong order now, like selecting the low-poly mesh first, and something different happened. Now it looks more accurate to the shape of the object, but the sides are awful. I tried shrinking the mesh, and playing with the ray distance, but it doesn’t fix the sides at all. Why is it behaving so weird? How can the sides be fixed?

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It looks from the last photo that you are selecting things in the wrong order, should be selecting like this.
High Poly then Low Poly.

I am selecting high to low as you said, and selected to active is also on. Thank you though! I appreciate you taking your time to help out!

The high do not need a UV for the bake. Center both objects on the scene, select the high first, and shift select the lowpoly last. The highpoly name needs to be blue while the lowpoly name needs to be white in the outliner. Set the extrusin to .5 and press bake. Things should go well. If the normal map does not cover the entire uv as expected, play with the extrusion. Or duplicate your lowpoly, add a displace modifier and see if things get better.

Selected to active means that every blue marked text in the outliner will bake to the active one with a white name.

Baking is an area of Blender that would require some serious love!

Hello Xortag. I don’t know what the extrustion is, is that the ray distance? Moreover, I did select the high-mesh first. And I only showed the high-poly UVs to show that it was leaving that odd imprint. Even so, I don’t know how to get rid of it now, without deleting the high-poly mesh altogether. But thank you very much for your time.

The sides are somewhat normal for a non cage bake. There is also padding, so don’t get the border wrong as it seems to be fine within the island seam.

Have a look at thoose short videos to understand the process. Ignore the software used in this videos, as they teach some basics that apply to all 3D applications.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnuK6xyi-qY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkUh6UcU97I

Note: The talking about smoothing groups are releated to “Auto Smooth” along with “Mark Sharp” in Blender.

Xortag, thank you again! I have now watched the videos you posted and set up a cage projection thing. And I am getting the same result with the sides yet, also I could not find the extrusion option, is it only in the latest version?