Blender 2.8 / 2.80 BAKING NORMAL MAP / SHADING / HARD EDGES 

I've never seen, and I truly mean that NEVER a better explanation of what are the normal maps and how to bake them. Thank you Artem for simplifying it for us and also going through cases where things might go wrong and how to fix them!

Best tutorial on normals.

Ive seen a lot on the subject but i think this video has done more. Baking a cube is not as simple as it would seem. Best video on the subject and ive been blending for years.

You are the droid I've been looking for. Finally found someone to explain the problem I've been having.

You sir are a gentleman, a wizard and a scholar. I've picked up 3 important new things here, and for that I salute you!

I had absolutely no idea the proper way to smooth was with normals>merge. This has got to be the most important blender tut i've found you youtube. thank you!

tons of subscribers to you!

thank u so much for this video, helped my confuse about hard edges and smooth edges

You should do a more in-depth baking tutorial on different methods of baking, their differences, pros and cons, use-cases and etc. I'd love a good tutorial explaining 1-SG baking, cageless and hard edge workflow, their cons and pros, avoiding seam breaks in smoothing, combining the methods, defining the correct curvature to avoid normal map skewing or avoiding the skewing by lowering the curvature of the hipoly and using bevel modifier to smooth out the meshes, using Weighted Normals to fix up flat triangulated faces that shade incorrectly on the hipoly. Also, object space normals and when they should be used. Honestly there is so much to cover. The best normal baking tutorial we have so far is the handplane videos and Cryengine / UE docs.

Thank you! the question of baking normal maps smooth or flat was always mocking me. This is a great tutorial. And what a sexy voice that is!

nobody was telling this .....and i was always getting error and error...but i m so thankful to u for making this nice and useful tutorial..this is really helping me a lot

Awesome!! This is what i was searching for months...

Its the best normal map tutorial i've ever seen- and i saw them a bit. Thanks!

WOW, I had this problem for years, I watched a great tutorial on this subject from the substance painter channel, but I couldn't apply it in blender, so using the cage will solve it for me, thank you so much, I subscribed, keep it up 😁

I was stuck for so long on baking normal's without any idea of how to fix my bakes! Thank you so much for this tutorial!

So much info on one video, thank you so much!

You are so fantastic. Never stop please

I'm learning 3D modeling RN cos of Corona at blender 2.8 and this is really helpful due to the tutorials on youtube being outdated. Good work Sir.

Muchas gracias, usted es un maestro como pocos.

great tutorial

This video was awesome thankyou!

Thanks for the tutorial :)

Thank you so much, really nice

Thank you so much! Subscribed

you r amazing man. You saved my lige i love you

Oh, man, thank you for the tip, how to create cage object easily, I puzzled over this for a long time

Great tutorial! Very straight forward.

thanks a lot

well i had to turn off autosmoth then apply Clear Sharp to all edges of the model and finally bake it, that worked for me.

in the past i've made alot of mistakes and tried to fix it. now i fully understand why my edge bleed when i bake my normals. In short, when tackling hard surface you should smooth split and UV split when baking the normals to avoid edge bleeding on the other hand when tackling organic modeling, its preferred to use one smoothing group to bake the normals.

Nice. Hope you could also do hardsurface or organic high poly using booleans or with addons like boxcutter, kitops, wires etc and make low poly versions of it. Thank you

Thanks for the tutorial that was very useful. You triggered me into experimenting and digging more into the shading, because I have been smoothing the entire low poly object. I actually hadn't notice that you can get errors inside UE4 but I found the reason for that. Before you bake and export the completely smoothed object, you have to triangulate the mesh. The reason why this shading issue happens is because each 3d software treats the triangulate operation differently. UE4 always triangulates the objects on import. Blender also triangulates the meshes, but that runs in the background and contributes to your object's shading although you only have quads. Another thing you must always do, is exporting tangents on your fbx export, and also import them in UE4 so you always get the accurate shading that you have in blender. And also important is to have some margin when you unwrap and when baking. So I will continue using completely smoothed objects and the reason is that smoothed objects give you less noticeable normal map seams as you also correctly mentioned in the video and in addition you don't need to mark all your edges as seams and have so many islands, like you need to do when having sharp edges on your model. I find it impractical to have one island for every face and I also think that islands' number have an impact on the performance of the game. I encourage you to give it another try and let me know if it works. Congrats for experimenting with those stuff because I have seen no tutorial getting so close to the correct way of baking normal maps and using the shading. I learned those stuff today with the help of your video. If you find that my method is correct (worked for me using your tutorial file) please make another video so that more people get to know the proper way. :)

I spent two days messing with the baking config and could not get it right. Thanks for the tutorial. With this and Erindale's procedural textures I'll be able to do everything I did in Substance designer/painter in Blender.

great video, do u have suggestions to silve edge bleeding after bakes?

Dude! i was after a thing and only you showed the best way to do it. Hard and soft edges. Thanks you! Btw, if i select shade Smooth by accident, all my normals will be set to smooth again ?

whats the difference between shade smooth and merge normals?

Can you explain why those edges are still visible?

4:02 why did the seams disappear? because of the uv-unwrapping or because of the marked seams? (i'm assuming the shading remained flat?)

I have a question about baking with a multires modifier for normals. I have a mesh that looks good with smooth shading and auto smooth, but whenever i start sculpting with multires applied, it reverts back to smooth shading and the edges look horrible, but whenever I use shade flat, on the final bake from multires, the normal map has visible faces from the high res mesh in it. Is there anything I can do about this?

Hey, i tried to to exactly as you but for some reason my edges are still visible in the baked curved part, i tried to do everything but to no avail, i just cant manage to get it to work as perfectly as in the video, im running 2.92, anyone else having such a problem ?

does that mean on my low ploy model. i have to mark seam on every edge which has fillets on high poly?

Please, is it possible to avoid using a time consuming cage by just splitting the UVs instead? Thanks in advance.

You Like Huey Lewis And The News?

*Note Very Important : do not connect normal map to shader while baking it will give you randomly wrong color " brown and green" .

What is CUBE_CAGE ?

Hi Artem, is it possible to get in touch with you for a small consulting work?

Why do you need a cage?