How to Bake Perfect Normals in Blender - Tutorial
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange users link it as the go-to walkthrough for normal map baking, both to answer baking questions and as the tutorial many askers were following when their bakes went wrong.
Recommended by 9 people across 9 different months, 2017 to 2024.
What it is
A Blender Guru tutorial by Andrew Price showing how to bake a normal map from a high poly model onto a low poly one in Blender 2.7x. It walks through overlapping the meshes, setting up the bake image and node, and baking, using a starter file from his anvil series.
What people said
Recommends Jan Kadeřábek · 2017-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Normal Maps can I create my own or download it?”
There are several ways, you can for example bake it from a high poly model which is covered in this tutorial: [this video] or you can use some normal map generator like CrazyBump or some non-commercial alternatives. But I am sure you can find some already made by searching the internet for "free normal maps" :)
Recommends m.ardito · 2017-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to carve a path in a mountain texture?”
@lakerice he's probably referring to normal baking to then use the hires normal map on lowres models (easy intro: [this video] )
Recommends Shehroz Khan · 2018-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to bake brick-wall geomerty into texture image?”
There's An Easy way to Bake a Normal Map from High Poly Mesh (Your Wall) To a low poly simply a cube.The first thing you would have to do. Is place High Poly Mesh in First Layer & Lowpoly in Second. I hope you'd be using Cycles Rather than Internal its just a slight difference. [LINK] In UV Image Editor Click for Image > New Image. Select a relation accordingly (make Sure it will be the power of 2) The Higher Resolution will give better Result. [LINK] Black Image Should Appear Select the Both Mesh High-Poly (Inactive) Low-Poly (Active). Select High Poly First & Lowpoly then(so High Poly will be inactive & Lowpoly Active) (Remember with Both layer Active). [LINK] Last one Open Node Setup add
Recommends Manu Järvinen · 2018-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Normal baking issue, some parts are low res”
This is a good video about baking good normal maps in Blender. Some similar issue resolving happening here: [this video] Don't know if this helps for your problem, though. Edit, whoops, only now I noticed you used xNormal for baking instead of Blender. Oh well... To sum it up, the issue in the video was this: [LINK] And the solution was to put value 0.05 instead of 0.1 to the 'Ray Distance' field and bake again. [LINK] [LINK]
Recommends 9hp71n · 2019-01 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “After Retopology, should I apply the modifiers to have a good "Normal Map Bake"?”
Assuming wireframe vertices on screenshot are from low poly retopology object, that object is not "sticking" to the high poly by itself. It's only through modifiers (mostly shrinkwrap) that it doesn't look like the vertices you can see around high poly. So you have to apply modifiers before baking (thought you should make a duplicate before that, to change modifiers in case something goes wrong). After that the easiest you can do is use Smart Unwrap, it will separate your retopo into "random" parts unwraping it. Thought it would be quite a bit better if you marked seams (Ctrl+E->M) and Unwraped it yourself (U->Unwrap). You can look up some simple tutorials on that ( this [this video] from Blender
Recommends Jason Oppermann · 2019-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How should i bake a normal map?”
had this same head ache i found the following video by andrew price at blender guru helpful in his anvil series also same process for other types of image files too eg: specular, diffuse, etc how to bake perfect normals blender 2.79 [this video]
Recommends Zeraun · 2019-07 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Why do baked textures turn out checkered or blocky?”
Try to increase/decrease that parameter before baking: Render - Baking - Ray Distance. Begin with small ray amount - 0.1 or around it. Also, some information from this video also can help: [this video] P.S. As i can judge by shape - you unwrapped your mesh properly? Re-check it, just to be sure.
Recommends Sigurjón Mýrdal · 2019-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “What is the purpose and idea behind baking in Blender?”
Just found this: [this video] from Blender Guru, and it looks like a good start. But as I have no overview, there might be more to it.
Recommends Marty Fouts · 2021-12 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How does baking work and when should you use it?”
It's a very general question because there are different types of baking and they are used for different purposes. But if you are only interested in texture baking to create apparent details, I recommend starting with this tutorial [this video] but carefully read the comments about how to update the steps for 2.9.
Cites J. J. · 2017-09 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Why my baked texture (normal, not combined), like a camo dalmata?”
I was following this Blender Guru tutorial [this video] but in the middle of the process the things just gone wrong. I don't know what happend, i did everything just like Andrew Price explained it but in my Anvil texture has these black spots: [LINK] What am i doing wrong? i followed everything showed in the video but this is the result. (BTW, i don't have the principled bsdf, so i'm trying to make tried to make it look like metal, if there's something wrong with the node edition, let me know it too, please ^^)