This! is... a normal map. And when you apply it to a mesh... it creates the illusion of height information, without costing you anything in render times. Now normal maps are frequently found on material websites, like Poliigon, as it allows you to create more realistic-looking materials. But... You can also create your own normal map by taking a high-res mesh, placing it on top of a low-res mesh, then baking the detail from one to the other. This method is used extensively in video games. And, in fact, if you go looking for it, You'll find that almost every single model in a "triple A game", has a normal map baked onto it. Because... It's free detail! It costs nothing in performance, but it adds significant detail and realism. And while it's often associated with video games, it's not exclusive. You'll find baked normals across most objects in movies as well. As it adds surface level detail, without costing anything in render times. So really useful trick. I think you'll find a lot of use for it. So... Let's get to it! Okay! So on layer one, we have our high-poly anvil with sculpting details and everything. And then on layer two, I have this lower-poly anvil - very simplified mesh. If you want to download this blend file you can, it's in the YouTube description. Or, if you've been following on from the last tutorials, then you should have something like this, as well. Now, first thing, before you start baking anything is you wanna make sure that both the high-poly and the low-poly mesh are sharing the same position. Like they're - basically they're overlapping each other. And you can see that ours sort of is... uhhh but it's not quite there. So what I'm gonna do is just select both meshes, and then I'm gonna hit "Alt-G" And "Alt-G" just moves the selected object to the exact center of the grid floor there. And because the origin point is the same, it's made them perfectly line up. And now you can see that they are exactly overlapped. Okay. Ummm... Cool. The other thing I want you to note is that we are in Cycles render mode. There's a slightly different workflow if you're using the old internal renderer. So that's why I'm telling you right now. Make sure you're - you are in Cycles render mode. um Ok! Now the next thing you need to do is, you need to create an image file. Because we are creating a normal map. And, because there's not - Like it - we're creating out of thin air - THIN AIR... we have to first of all create that image. So I'm gonna split this view here, and I'm gonna go to the "UV/Image Editor". Okay, so this is where it normally displays your render, which is why it says "Render Result" there. But if we click "Image", and then hit "New (Image)"... Um This little pop up here appears. Um... So first of all, give it a name. (Typing) "Normal" And then for the width and the height, that's quite important. Um Because, if it's too small of an image file, like dimension-wise, um you're gonna see like blurriness in your actual Um final looking normal map. So you wanna make sure it is big enough. One is a little bit too small... 2k is better. Ummm K, by the way, It's like a thousand. So yeah, if this was 2,000, that would be okay. But it's actually better if it is 4k, in this particular case. So, instead of actually just clicking this and typing in "4000", you want to actually keep the numbers to the power of two. I believe, that is. So the easiest way to do this is if it's "1024". If you just type in... "Times" or star four "*4", it's now done that multiplication for you. In the field. Which is a cool little trick a lot of peop- a lot of people don't realize you can do. Like you can do like... divided by 3 "/3", or... Uh, whatever... Oh, and the other thing you can do is if you just hit "Ctrl-C", over one value, and then "Ctrl-V". And it pastes it. There you go, little trick. Ok! So you hit "OK", and look at that! We have a completely, black-looking square. Which is... fine. Ummm Now... The bake settings is exactly where my head is so I'm gonna move my face out of the way, because it's less important than this. So... The baking - Uhhh information, that's here, in the render view - render panel, right at the bottom, you'll see one that says "Bake". Right here. Um So the bake type, by default, is set to "Combined", we want to change it to "Normal". Now you can leave all of these setting as it's default. But, because we are baking from one object onto another... what we wanna do is select "Selected to Active". And then! One you've done that, you want to make sure that you, first of all, select your high-poly mesh FIRST. So FIRST is the HIGH-POLY mesh. And I know that it's that because I can see all the sculpting detail there. And then, select your LOW-POLY mesh, AFTERWARDS. So, "Selected to Active" is it is basically... it's everything which is selected, it's gonna bake it to the active object. The active (object), is the last one which is selected, because it is that lighter, orange color. Whereas, the previous selected objects are orange. um So there you go. (Laughing) A little bit... I don't know. You gotta work your head around it. But there you go. So now that we've done that, if we were to hit "Bake", you would see that it says "No active image found...". You might think - "Well, why? We've already created this one here?!". Well... It's actually looking for it, in the material setting of that object. So, if we were to split this view, right here, Ummm and then change this to be the "Node Editor". And then here - So we're - again, this is with the selected object, which is the low-poly object. There's no material, so I'm just gonna hit "New". And then here - It's just created a "Diffuse Shader". Whatever, doesn't matter. What we want to do is add in... The ima- an IMAGE TEXTURE node. So "Texture\Image Texture". So that was "Shift-A" I used to bring this thing up. So "Shift-A". And then, just click, drop that in here, and then from this drop-down, we're just gonna select the name of our image that we created. So I'm just gonna click "Normal" Now... Because this "Image Texture" node is selected, now, when we hit normal (Bake*), it's going to start, finally... baking. So it's a little, a roundabout way of... of - getting there. And it's a little bit "fiddly' and... You wouldn't be alone if you thought like "Wow, that's a little bit... uhh of a weird workflow.". But I believe the reason it's doing - it looks for the selected node in the material, Umm. Is that... It is uhhhh... It - This baking setting allows you to bake every single object, in a scene, at the same time. So, if you wanted to do that, at the same time, for every object, you would need to make sure that the material, there's a node in it selected. So that's that workflow. Anyways, it'll take you about 30 seconds. And... 100% - There we go! Okay! So. This... (Lol) is the image that it has baked. Now, if you're not used to... you know, normal maps, you're probably thinking like "Is that right?". "Looks pretty weird to me, but maybe it's right?". Well... No. It's half right. Okay so this... Purple/pink/bluey sort of color, that's really good. So it's got some of it right, but it's got this... mustard green (?!) values for everything else. So if you see like this mustard green (color) that's... Uhh Basically incorrect. It means that something hasn't baked properly. I believe it means it's baking the opposite side of a face that it should be. Umm But anyway, the reason it has done that, is that down here, underneath "Selected (to) Active", you've got a "Ray Distance" value. And that is the distance, that the mesh is going to be shooting the rays out from the face, to find the high-poly mesh. So it found some of the information okay. Like, on the inside there. Um But the stuff that is pointing outside the mesh, it hasn't found it at all. So you just need to increase the value to be anything that isn't... um zero. So let's try point one ".1" and let's bake that and let's see what we get. Aaaannd... 100%. There we go. Okay. So this is what we've got. um And this is almost there. It's like totally purple and blue and pink. Which is great! And then right up here... We've got a little green area. ughhh So something's not right, as well. And the reason for that is that is that area right there, that portion of the mesh, if we were to go into "Edit Mode", and have a look, we would see that it's this little circle right here. So this "Ray Distance", what it's actually doing is it's shooting the rays out, outside the mesh, which is great. But it's also, happened to shoot it in this little area, and it's actually hitting the walls on the other side. So basically, this value (.1), is slightly too high. So let's try half of that value, which would be ".05". And now when we bake it... We can see that it looks fine! So with that green area is gone away, and you can see the rest of it looks fantastic. So congratulations! You have baked your normal (map)! So the next step is to save it. So go "Image\Save As Image". And then you need to find somewhere on your hard drive that you want to save it. um I've done this quite a few times, so I'm going to name it "Normal6" png and hit "Save As (Image)". Um So if you were to - I don't know. You're exporting this into Unity or Unreal you can do that right now. But what I'm going to show you is how to... with this low-poly one selected, is to give it a render and see how it looks with that normal map applied to it. So... uhhh Okay, let's move that out of the way, and let's have a look at this. So what we wanna do is we wanna take this image texture, and we want to connect it into the "Normal" input, of our Diffuse Shader, right there. If you were to render it, it would look totally weird. And that is because you need to drop in a "Normal Map" node. So "Shif-A, Vector\Normal Map". And drop it between the image texture and your thing (Diffuse Shader). So it's now gone - converting it to the right colors. As it should. The "Strength", that's the strength of the bump. But we can just leave it as "1". And the other thing that you need to make sure you change is go from "Color" to "Non-Color Data". Which is what you need to do whenever you're using a normal map. Okay, so, now that we've done that, let's have a look at it with some lights. I've just got some lights here and a plane. On layer 11 there. So I'm just having a look at the low-poly mesh and those lights. And let's give it a quick render with "Shift-Z". And you can actually see some detail on the mesh. Now, it's really hard to see because this Diffuse Shader - it's really not the best shader for looking at this sorta thing. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change it to... something which we'll actually use for the final material, and that is a "Principled Shader". Which is the new... spanking-new shader for... 2.79. Which is really cool. Now I'll take that normal map, drop it into the "Normal" input there, and now... I'll set the value to be really metallic. 100% metallic. And... The roughness - I'll turn it down slightly and let's make this a darker metal. And now... We can see what it looks like. And there you go! It's hard to actually believe like - okay like "Ok, are we looking at the high-poly mesh?". No. This IS the low-poly mesh! We're only looking at the low poly on layer 2 there. And if I was to have a look in - in "Edit Mode", you can see that it is that! Okay. Which is really, really cool! um So that's why this normal map thing is so, so... Awesome! umm Because yeah, this just would not be possible - like to render this in 3 seconds, or whatever. Let's actually try it with the high-poly mesh, and let's see how long that takes... It'll have it a Diffuse Shader, I guess, on it. But let's have a look. So you can see... We went from the 3 second render to a... Whatever. This is 7 seconds. So it's over double the render time, to actually use the high-poly. Although there's no difference between them. ummm So that's why this is so important. That's why it's so cool. umm Yeah! So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up! Help other people to find it. And if you wanna go and uh - go to the next video, after this we are going to be texture painting this bad boy. So if you wanna see that, go ahead and click on... that video, up there. Thank you for watching. See you in the next video. Bye!
You've probably heard that a kjillion times, but you're really a great dude. I probably wouldn't be able to create anything in blender if it weren't for you.
God, I love how much you seem to genuinely enjoy the cool little nuances of 3D modeling. It's a contagious excitement! As always, thanks for posting