Blender Tutorials

How to render colourful templates
Importing Missing Textures into Blender
UV Mapping in Blender
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Diffuse and Normal Map Baking
Using Sollumz Blender Plugin
How to create wires in Blender

WildFyr Documentation > Blender Tutorials > Diffuse and Normal Map Baking

Diffuse and Normal Map Baking

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to make a high poly model into a normal map for your low poly model!

Creating and Unwrapping your low poly mesh

The first thing you need to do, is use your high poly model as a reference to model your lower poly mesh. For this tutorial, I will use my AED Defibrillator. First import your model into Blender, and create a new simple object like a cube. Use the scale tool to make the cube match the size of your object roughly, we will adjust this more in Edit mode. Once your cube is ready, press alt+a and apply scale and rotation and then tab to enter edit mode.

Now with your cube scaled to the object you are trying to mimic, let's get down to refining the layout more. Using the loop cut tool (CTRL+r) and create a few loop cuts, we can manipulate to fit to the model more accurately.

After you are happy with where the model is, head over to the UV Editing tab. Select everything and press u to get to the UV unwrap menu, select "Smart UV Project" and this should make you a nice new UV map for your low poly model. You might want to do some adjustments to the mapping to make a better use of the texture space.

Diffuse Map Bake

Alright, now to the fun part! Preheat your oven to 450°... oh wait, wrong baking tutorial...

Jokes aside head over to Blender's Shading tab, create a material for your object if you have not already, Material>"+" icon>name your material. Then in the Shader Editor at the bottom, create a new node by pressing "Shift+A" click on search and typing in "Image Texture", press the "New" button to make a new texture with the following settings: (Note: You can change the texture side to meet your needs, for this tutorial I will be using a 4K texture) width and height to 4096, colour to clear (Click the black bar and set Alpha to 0) and Alpha checked.

Next we need to select our old mesh, and our new mesh. If your old mesh has multiple parts, you can join them all together by selecting them all and pressing "Ctrl+J". Clci on your high poly model in the hierarchy and CTRL click your lower poly model. Head to the Render settings and switch your Render Engine from EEVEE to Cycles if it is not already (EEVEE does not yet support baking), scroll down to the bake section. In the bake settings switch your bake type to "Diffuse" and check "Selected to Active", this will take the information from the selected mesh (our high poly model) to the active mesh (our low poly model), finally set the Extrusion to 0.1m (Don't worry, if Blender hits the mapping from another object, it will meet them both nicely in the middle and won't overlap your bake). Now, click the Bake button and watch the magic happen!

Normal Map Bake

After you have finished the Diffuse map, we can now get some bump action going on to add more detail, without needing any more polygons! We will use the same Image Texture node, press the little X next to the old texture and click new. This time, uncheck "Alpha".

Now do the same dual selection we did for the Diffuse bake, select your high poly model and control click the lower poly one, under the Bake settings set it to "Normal" this time, leave the other settings unchanged from before (Selected to Active, and Extrusion to 0.1m).

Finished Bakes

And there you go! Below you can see both bakes I did for my AED (They are lower resolution due to being part of a prop pack, and the texture file is shared) Some texture clean-up might be needed in a photo editor of your choice, like on my model I need to adjust where the carry handle is as Blender didn't know what to do with it being filled in (I did this to cut down on poly count, but I might actually cut it out later).

Diffuse:

Normal:

Final Product:

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