Blender 2.91 Hardsurface Sculpting : Baking the Normal Map

hello guys this is jnam with a blender tutorial on how to bake a normal map from a high poly mesh to a low poly mesh this is the high poly that we sculpted and now i want to bake the details to this low poly mesh it is the base mesh that we started so don't do a re-topo because we didn't change the shape that much i just did a voxel remesh in the previous part and sculpted damages details to the mesh and you see the low poly is covering the high poly mesh nicely but it can be optimized so that the vertices of the low poly really snap to the high poly mesh and for this i add a modifier to the low poly mesh and this is a shrink wrap modifier the target i set to the high poly then i switch to edit mode for the low poly mesh and to see the result of this shrink wrap the vertices snapped to the high poly mesh you can activate this option on cage okay with this modifier it is really snapping to the high poly mesh and what i'm going to do now is i press the u key and choose smart uv project this does an automatic uv unwrapping which should be good enough for this simple mesh okay we have it unwrapped shrink wrapped so let's go ahead and bake first of all i open a new window and with the low poly selected i open the shader editor this is my default material with the principal shader then i press shift a and add a normal map node connect it to the principal shader then add an image texture connect it to the color of the normal map and for this i add a new image to that i will bake the normal map the resolution are set to 2k you can just multiply this and then i press ok the color space are set to non-color data great now select this node that you want to bake to this image texture and then i open a new window an image editor and that we can see the image that we are going to bake i selected here the stone normal and now you have to do these steps in the exact same way first select the high poly object then the low poly with the control key pressed be sure to have the render engine set to cycles if your graphic card supports it you can enable gpu for the device then you go to the bake section and set the bake type to normal check selected to active the selected high poly to the active low poly and play around with the distance i got good results with 0.5 okay and then we can press bake now this takes a while i speed this up a bit and then here we have it in the image editor the baked normal map it is assigned to the lower poly mesh so we can disable the high poly and here we see the low poly mesh in the viewport with the normal map assigned for the principal shader you can set a different color if you like it is set to full roughness you can also play around with this or add a roughness map but in the next part i will show you how to bake a cavity map to improve the look and feel even more so i hope it was understandable how to bake a normal map if you like this tip and my channel then don't forget to subscribe follow me on my instagram facebook or twitter support me by being my patron this would be great and i'll see you in the next one here on jnm

Channel: Jayanam

Views: 69,679

Keywords: blender baking, jayanam, blender baking normals, blender normal map, blender normal baking, blender texturing, blender texture baking, blender texture mapping, blender normals explained, blender texturing tutorial, Blender 2.91, Blender 2.91 sculpting, blender high poly to low poly, high poly to low poly blender 2.8, baking, texture baking, blender texturing sculpt, texture, blender, jayanam blender, blender bake normal map, blender bake texture, blender cycles baking

Id: tndUB5b4STI

Length: 4min 15sec (255 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020

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