Blender Tutorial - Creating a Combat Knife Game Asset - Part 3 - Baking Normal Maps 

i baked and have issue with the normal map there some yellow colour appearing on my normal map

@@Zohaib6M Hey send your blend file to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out.

Hi, can you help me with the texture?my texture looks strange, there is yellow and green color after I bake it, I'm using blender 3.1.2, and I use the same file as yours (knife - part 2 - final blend file) to follow along this video. Thank you..

​@@evanstakhom8016 It's likely happening because in newer versions of Blender they added a new option in the Baking panel called "Extrusion" which you'll need to increase. It's under the "Selected to Active" panel. This option inflates the low poly mesh so it doesn't overlap the high poly mesh, and you'll need to increase this amount to something low like .001 or .01. Test out the amounts until you're no longer getting those yellow and green colors. Let me know if that works out for you.

@@blengine got result look like the 32 bit bake set to default color space, already try to change the extrusion from .001 to 0.100 plus use the non color space on the shader editor. Thanks anyway for replying, I really appreciate it..

Thanks Thrace, glad you liked it! Ah and the Jeep course has been retired but the Corvette course is still available. -Chris

Life saver, can't tell how much this has been annoying me😂😂👍. For anyone looking now, the shortcut has changed to shift-n in 2.8

Thanks Anton! Glad you liked it =) -Chris

Glad to help! Oh and someone on Twitter also let me know that you can flip the green channel of normal maps in UE, so no need to re-bake normal maps you might have already made : twitter.com/MarcClintDion/status/1005995546748702720 -chris

awesomeee

hello bro ,can you please check my channel ? there is some simple but cool animations i made using blender

Glad you liked it! I was glad I made this one, and may redo it for 2.9, because in doing a little research for some of the info involved I was pretty surprised at the lack of clear information on a few of the topics involved. So it's something I'd like to keep updated. As for the baking tab, I double checked in 2.9 and the baking tab still seems like it's in the same place. In the Render Properties I have the Render Engine set to Cycles, and then near the bottom of the options is a panel for "Bake". -Chris

Awesome! It's a great knife that I've wanted to model for a while. I'll be including the stamps on the knife but that will actually be done with bump maps when we go to texture this. -chris

The texturing part is coming soon, hopefully this weekend. I'm still pretty new to substance painter so I'm taking my time learning a bit more first. -chris

We'll definitely be diving more into game engines this year. I'm really interested in Armory and potential plans of further integration into Blender 2.8. I'll wait on that news to figure out what I'm going to do. Lee just started a Unity series though if you were interested in that. -chris

Thanks! And I baked in Blender for a couple reasons. One was to just show the process for anyone that doesn't use Substance Painter, because getting a good normal map in Blender can be a little tricky with 32 bit baking to avoid color banding, and knowing which Y direction to use for baking for different game engines and all. Secondly I actually thought I'd end up using the normal map in substance painter but that wasn't the case, whoops. The normal map from blender produced some faint triangulationlines in the curvature map in substance and I'm still unsure why, so I just re-baked in substance. -chris

Yeah I see, sorry I actually didn't watch last video so I preassumed you gonna use normal map baked in Blender.. I thought baking in Blender for Substance have some pros, that's why I asked. Although thanks for sharing info about baking in Blender, might become helpful.

Yep had to change something real quick and re-up. -chris

TexTools actually looked amazing, and I almost used it for this tutorial but I wanted to play with it a little more first. Glad you liked the video btw =) -c

CG Masters If you're still trying to figure out how to use it, I'd recommend this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-y_1ql8yH2Ow.html It's a little old and it's a MAX video, but it should show you how to use TexTools.

That's a very good question. Triangulation matters a lot with the low poly version because we're baking a normal map onto it, and how this normal map is baked depends on exactly how the mesh gets triangulated during the baking process. The normal map will look different depending on how the mesh is triangulated. So that's why it's important to manually triangulate the low poly mesh in Blender first, we want to make sure that the normal map we bake always lines up perfectly with the low poly mesh. Since different software will triangulate the mesh differently, if we don't triangulate the low poly mesh first, we could end up with a triangulated mesh in other software that no longer matches up with the normal map we baked. So triangulating things manually in Blender before baking will ensure that the normal map will always line up with the mesh no matter what software we export it to. That was just a refresher that leads us to whether or not the high poly mesh needs to be manually triangulated too. The answer is no. The high poly mesh is used solely for the one-time baking process so we don't need to make sure it looks the same in all different software. We just need to make sure that the normal map we bake from the high poly mesh lines up with the triangles of the low poly mesh. So only the low poly mesh needs to be triangulated so that its topology is always the same in all software. This makes sure the normal map will always look the same on its surface. Let me know if that clears things up!

@@blengine Very clearly explained, thank you.

Are these bleeds on the actual map that's baked, or do you mean you're seeing bleeding along seams on the model after applying a map? If you could send a model with a baked map that has the issues I could check it out. You can send it to contact@cgmasters.net. -Chris

Awesome thanks for the extra info and links! -chris

Coming over from 3dsmax we had textools which allowed us to smooth the LP from its uv islands. Not sure if there's a viable alternative here but that's a quick way of doing it

Quite recently the same developer of TexTools who created it for 3dsmax released TexTools for Blender too (for free!!!). Yesterday version 1.3.0 has been released. Take a look at renderhjs.net/textools/blender/. Chris did also mention it in his video and added a link in the description ;-)

I have this artifacts-problem, and no idea how to fix it. Could someone please help meto solve it? Here you can see the screenshot: oi63.tinypic.com/2vbajjl.jpg

Thank you Chris for the excellent detailed tutorial! And thank you Artem for sharing those helpful links! That Marmoset link was golden -- so much incredible baking info in there! I finally discovered the artifact I was experiencing: "Normal Map Skew" (very noticeable when baking bolts, nuts, screws, etc). Warren Marshall has an incredible video on how to fix this (using MODO, but it works the same in Blender). The gist is basically running loop cuts anywhere the vertex normals are starting to bend away from perpendicular (in my case, I needed both horizontal and vertical loops running through the center where the bolts would be baked to ensure I would get a "flat" result). 😄

Sorry this wasn't more clear, but when copying modifiers from one object to another, Blender will copy modifiers from the Active Selection, which is the selection with a brighter highlighted outline (usually the last object selected but not always). That object's modifiers will get copied to all the other selected objects. -Chris

I might be putting together a broad normal map baking video where I'll definitely include using TexTools. -chris

Well that would be awesome! Looking forward to this

The reason you're seeing the low poly silhouette is because the model is still low poly. This is correct, and nothing is wrong. The idea of normal baking is to bake things like bevel detail and other height information into the TEXTURE of an object. This doesn't modify geometry at all. So you can have a low poly object, but have smooth edges and stuff like a high poly object. Obviously this effect breaks when you move in close enough to count polys, but that tradeoff is worth it for the added detail essentially added for free.

Yep textools does have the option for that. I think it essentially does the same thing and renders it larger and shrinks it. It does it all for you. I considered using that for this tutorial but wanted to learn more about it first. -chris

Which one of your objects is named Plane? Double check to make sure that's UV unwrapped. If that's a random object that's not part of the knife, then you might've forgotten to check "selected objects" when you exported the knife from Blender. If that's unchecked then Blender will export all the objects in your scene. Hopefully that helps. -chris

Thank you for the quick response and YES, that was the issue! It didn't even cross my mind about that - i feel so stupid now lol. Can't wait to texture this and maybe show you my results? :D

Also : When I add any texture it does this to the blade: i.gyazo.com/f8528cdc27e3742b187be0b7fd04c04b.png Looks like there might of been some stretching? hmm

Haha no worries, important options have a tendency to get lost and overlooked in the crowd of buttons in Blender... For the texture, when you imported the model, did you make sure to set the option to OpenGL instead of DirectX? We baked the normal map specifically for OpenGL so you'll need to make sure that's what substance painter is using for your new file. I'll be going over this stuff in the next chapter. -c

You're actually a god! Thanks again - Here's some of the results of me texturing it around and messing about :P What do you think? imgur.com/a/a3Tov5H

Hey, send your blend file over to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out.

@@blengine This is a great honor for me. Thank you, I will send you. But I will be sincerely sorry if the error is on the surface, but I spent a lot of time solving the problem and nothing helped. I changed the length of the beam, altered the sweep, and at least something.

@@blengine It seems to have worked out. I'm a fool. It's just that the normals were turned out on one part of the mesh. I learned about face orientation and it helped me.

The bake option we use is called "Selected to Active", this means that anything selected will be baked onto the Active Selection, which is the last object that's selected. So in this case, the low poly object is selected last so it's the Active Selection which means the other selected high poly object will bake onto the low poly object. -Chris

If there's anything you wanted me to take a look at, you can send the blend to me at chris.cgmasters@gmail.com and I'll check it out.

Hey, if you're having trouble with it still you can email me the blend at chris.cgmasters@gmail.com and I'll check it out.

Sorry for the late reply! In newer versions of Blender there's an "Extrusion" option in the baking options. Turn this up to .01 and let me know if that helps. This option kind of bubbles out the mesh when baking so it's not perfectly overlapping the other mesh. I don't know why this is necessary now but it's an easy fix luckily.

​@@blengine omg, thank you so much! The fact that you still replying to all questions after almost 3 years is just insane. I'm thankful, really

@@rlcewithmeat1172 No problem!

Hey Roman, yes modifiers are automatically applied when you export your low poly model, so you don't need to apply the triangulate modifier in order to have that effect on your exported model. For high poly models, we don't need to apply their modifiers either. We're using high poly models for baking, and baking is basically the same as rendering, so the modifiers are automatically applied at the time of baking. So they don't need to be manually applied. UV Unwrapping after adding a triangulate modifier won't be any different. When you have a triangulate modifier, then at the time of rendering the modifier is applied and it will split all quads on your mesh (and on your UV Map) into triangles. And because a quad can be split into triangles in two different directions, this does affect how normals are baked to the UV Map. That's why it's important to explicitly triangulate your mesh in Blender. All quads are triangulated at render time anyway, but if you don't triangulate things on your own, then Blender will automatically triangulate your mesh at render time in its own default way. So the normals will be baked based on this default triangulation. Then when you export your un-triangulated mesh to other software like a game engine, that software might have a different default way of triangulating your mesh. The problem is that the normal map you baked in Blender was based on Blender's triangulation, so now that normal map won't look right in the other software which triangulates the mesh differently. For a simpler model like this, smooth shading works perfectly, but more complex models could benefit from something called "smoothing groups" which you can look into. You can indeed join all objects together for a single bake. But this can result in the normals overlapping. If you join the objects together, the software doesn't really know that the handle should be a separate piece, it treats the whole knife as one piece, so you could end up with parts of the handle guard baking onto the top of the handle since they intersect each other. It can get messy. I think there are ways to handle this, like maybe with something called "baking cages", but baking individual pieces is an easy way to get clean results. In Substance Painter you have the convenient option to explode bake like we do in the tutorial. It'll take each separate mesh and bake it separately. I'm not sure if Blender has anything like that or if it has an add-on that can achieve this. Baking is not something I do a ton of. Good luck figuring things out more! It's a complex subject and can be hard to find specific answers for. I remember making this tutorial was a pain because there were a lot of questions I had that I had to really dig for and experiment with so I could share that info in the tutorial. -Chris

@@blengine Thanks, mate! Nice to hear you also have some difficulties) Watching your tutorials, i thought you are blender god😄 So, any tuts open some new horizons to study. Like endless game. But, Chris, back to this damn normal map. I have checked everything. Normals face correct way, Scale is 1. UV MAP is correct - there is no stretch, solid blue. High poly model is not disaster, looks smooth. Image texture was baking as non color. What can be a reason. There is only a small difference when i change the margins. But not significant. Any idea?

Could be a couple things, send the blend file over to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out.

NVM . For some reason those objects had more then 1 material o0

@@solidusseal Cool I'm glad you figured things out -Chris

Yeah this is the basic process for game assets. I don't really understand your question though. This tutorial and the next one go over baking normal maps in both blender and substance painter and after the next tutorial you'll have a completed knife with all texture maps.

@@blengine Yes, I've just seen it. I meant to say baking the textures to the object so when you open it in a game engine it already has all the textures on it, so it looks like it does when it's rendered with no extra manipulations. I've seen it a few times when I was working in Unity.

Not always, like in this simpler model the normal bake was perfect and no extra steps were needed to get it that way. Thanks for sharing the link though, I'm sure it's handy for those that want to dive more into normal baking. -Chris

If you're using a newer version of blender, in the Baking properties try increasing the Extrusion value to .01 or .1 and see if that works. If not send your blend file over to me at contact@cgmasters.net.

@@blengine hi thanks for help, ill try it, I tried to scale the highpoly down so it doesnt touch the low poly, its probably not a correct way to do it but the normal map came out pretty decent, and finally i managed to follow the tutorial to the end and baked all maps in substance painter. Thanks for this series, my knife looks a bit different but still I like how it presents itself

Hey, send the blend file over to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out later today.

Same here, did you find what's causing it?

It depends what you're baking. If you're doing a Combined bake or another bake option that might logically need some light, then it'll require lighting. If you're following along with this tutorial and just baking Normals then no lights are needed.

@@blengine what if Im baking the textures, like if I was going to make the metal material of the blade myself and bake it why would it bake a black silhouette and what method of baking do I need to use e.g combined, diffuse.

@@chrissem5200 Baking is honestly something I'm not that familiar with. I do plan on creating a series of tutorials just on baking soon, but at the moment the knife tutorial is the extent of my knowledge on things. You might have some luck posting your blend file on blenderartists.org though, their help section is pretty good.

@@blengine thank you.

Ah I think I found the problem. Are you saving it as an 8bit .png from Blender, or as a .jpeg? Saving a 32 bit bake as either of those will apparently change the color. I didn't think of that when doing this tutorial, and just assumed the colors would be consistent. But looks like if you bake 32 bit, you actually have to save as 16-bit and no lower. Let me know if that was the issue, else I'll have to do more digging. -chris

Sorry Chris. You were right. In the Output settings in the Render tab it was set to 8bit instead of 16 bit. My bad.

Oh good =)

Hey, send your knife file over and I'll check it out.

@@blengine Its not knife file this time. this time im doing my own model but I remember you were baking in substance so I baked it in substance and it turned out better.

I'll have to look into cage baking, haven't used it before. It wasn't necessary for the knife though as the knife's rather simple and baked just fine. -chris

Hey, does your model have any doubles by any chance? Check for that and if all else fails send the blend to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out. -Chris

Solved it :) for some reason the high poly mesh was rotated. Thanks anyway, I love your tutorials.

Awesome good to hear

At 8:00 in the last video I separate all the meshes again. I only joined them together to UV unwrap them together, then I separate them at the end of the video. As a side note, these days you can just go into edit mode of multiple objects at the same time so no joining is necessary anymore.

@@blengine thank you very much

You can send your blend file and normal maps to me at contact@cgmasters.net and I'll check it out. -Chris

Direct X would be +X,-Y,+Z, with just the Y axis being inverted. It's been a long time since I worked with normal maps in other software though, so you might want to double check things elsewhere to make sure that's still how it is.

Hey, email your knife file over to me and I'll check it out.

@@blengine Thanks. I just figured out that there were some flipped normals in the place and it didnt override the other baked texture when I was baking so I had to create a new window to bake texture on.

Hey looks like you just added in a Normal node instead of a Normal Map node. Just switch that and you should be good to go. -chris

Ooookay..... i'm such a noob!!!!! :( :(. One and a half year with blender and I'm still making rookie mistakes. :'( :'( Thank You So Much.

haha don't sweat it. I've been using Blender for 15 years and once in a while still come across something simple I should've known about and just end up smacking my head. There's so many tools and options, it's just one of those things that you never stop learning. Hope your knife's coming out good, I can say that the silhouette looks nice =)

Hi Chris. This is the final render before using the substance painter. drive.google.com/open?id=1g7L1i2CJM6Wle5kYKuUAPUxSAsq08InL

Nice the model looks perfect!

I've been trying not to use photoshop for any tutorials for a while, and basically just procedural texturing in Blender whenever possible. I have used gimp before, so if need to use image editing software in the future I'll definitely consider it. Or maybe even krita. -c

Thank you for your consideration