The Fundamentals of Perfect Baking
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when normal map bakes come out wrong and they need the underlying theory of how baking projects one mesh onto another.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2015 to 2022.
What it is
A 2012 tutorial by Michael Hosticka explaining three essential concepts for baking normal maps from a high-resolution mesh onto a low-resolution mesh. It is not Blender-specific and draws on material from polycount.com.
What people said
Recommends Carlo · 2015-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to properly bake normal maps?”
As staded by @Yvain [LINK] baking one object maps to another involves projecting them on the baking faces. If you move the object away, or the faces are not pointing each other, you'll not get expected results. [LINK] [LINK] While it would be cool not to have the object in the same place for baking highres to low, a similar behaviour would limit the user possibilities. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as baking normal maps involves many aspects, such as resolution, uv maps, shading, cages... I would suggest to have a look of these tutorial: The Fundamentals of Perfect Baking [this video] (not blender related) Blender 2.71 - Cycles Baking using Cages [LINK]
Recommends Pulak · 2019-06 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to get perfect baked normal map?”
I downloaded xNormal, and just randomly youtube'd for a tutorial, i find this tutorial to be really helpful to understand what went wrong with my procedure and to get an in depth understanding of baking in general. here's the link. [this video]
Cites vklidu · 2022-04 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “New to high->low poly baking why are my maps not lining up as expected?”
Cage Not in depth explanation, but if you change Max Ray Distance you can see it results in circles, so it looks a Cage Normal direction is calculated something like an average of two faces and not directly the face one. [LINK] Without Cage In this specific situation is better do not use the Cage, so the rays are shot in direction of Normal. Use simply Selected to Active and adjust Extrusion value like 0.3 [LINK] [LINK] Probably better explanation here [this video] [LINK] Or... Usually to bake this kind of normals (shapes on a flat surface), you go to Bake on Plane (placed above). [LINK]