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Chapter 03 - Baking Normal Maps
How to bake normal maps and correctly view the results.
8 comments
@Aidy_Burrows I am lost and confused. When you set the viewport mode from solid to textured at 1:43, there appears to be a hard cut in the video in which the blue normal texture disappears from the model and is replaced by flat grey. I get the exact opposite. My model is gray in solid mode, but when I switch to texture mode, my model is blue. None of the controls in the texture menu seem to do anything. I can change any or all of the settings in there and all I get is the same blue normal image applied as a diffuse texture. Even changing the image in the texture menu does nothing. I've tried unlinking my normal image from the object and I get a 100% white surface... but still no normals or diffuse applied from the texture menu. Ready to pull some hair out. Blender 2.79.
Edit: I finally got everything working. It seems like blender 2.79 handles viewport shading differently than 2.74 (shown here in this tutorial). Texture mode only shows linked images for me - anything in the texture menu itself is completely ignored until material mode is selected - at which time the linked images are ignored instead. Maybe this section of the tutorial is in need of modernization?
@tankcrusher210: Thanks for the heads up and for sharing this info here! I'll try to get round to checking out what the deal is and any potential for update. Though it may remain just in text format for now as we're so close to 2.8 :)
@Aidy_Burrows after applying the normal map, the model becomes black in the viewport. It displays correctly when rendered. If I add more lights it becomes visible but the mapping seems distorted with black patches. I tried recalculating the normals but it didn't help. The same issue happens when I use your model. I'm using Blender 2.79.
This only happens when texture mapping coordinates are set to UV. In other modes there are no issues with light, but the mapping is obviously wrong.
@Aidy_Burrows: Hi Aidy, thanks for the response. I posted the same question on https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/100819/black-banding-in-viewport-material-mode-with-normal-map and seems that the issue is with my hardware setup. I'm just reposting it here in case somebody else encounters the issue.
@n.lajic: hi! Feel free to pack your images into the blend file, and i'll take a look if you like? I think you can upload the file to the blendercloud here and share it with me, or you can email it to me directly using annex2nothing (at) gmail dot com. :) Aidy.
So I'm having issues getting my normal bake to work right. I'm baking a HiPoly Base to the LoPoly one like in the video. HiPoly is just the LoPoly with a bevel modifier (I did the select sharp edges and set bezel weight as shown in an earlier video). The HiPoly looks smooth, but the baked normals don't see to match up, nor do they look right when applied to the LoPoly base mesh.
http://i.imgur.com/NWXrscx.png http://i.imgur.com/69dHJSj.png this is what I'm looking at right now. I suspect it's a matter of resolution on the normal map texture, as you can see in the bottom right window in the first pic, everything is pixel width.
@yobi.gochida: Hi, apologies for the delay in response, I don't get personally notified of comments but I'm checking through everything now.
I'm thinking that possibly the baking issue here could be to do with the mirror modifier not being turned off on rendering (camera icon) during the bake.
Did you find a solution? Otherwise I can look further into this for you. :) Aidy.
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