When baking a Normal Map the Normal keeps coming up blank

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’m trying to bake a normal map for recessed text but all I get is a blank normal map.

I was using the technique in this tutorial:

I used this technique earlier on a pattern I made and it worked well. Not sure what’s going wrong here.

2

If your text is extruded straight down into the plane there won’t be any detail on the normal map. Need to give it a bit of a bevel or some other “lip”.

1 Like
3

Thanks that did it!

So can you not make 90 degree angles to the plane in a normal? Most of the other things I’ve used normals for were more organic stuff. I guess that’s why I never ran into this before.

4

No, every texel in your texture would be holding data for the face/point it ‘sees’(in the sense of UV projection) and the normal there is pointing right at it thus giving that flat blue color as a result.