Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

Tutorial: Bake Normal Maps From Meshes

5

Baking normal maps is a common technique for reducing mesh complexity while maintaining a visual suggestion of lots of detail. You'll commonly see it in real-time and game applications. Here's how you do it.

Blenders default render engine, "Blender Render" or "Blender Internal" as it's often called, includes a dedicated sub-system that can be used to generate various types of image map, typically of an object in of itself (direct or self-referencing), or by translating the details of one to another (indirect or inferred referencing). This latter approach is most often used to create Normal maps, a process whereby the detail of a high-resolution model is rendered down, or "Baked", to an image UV mapped to a low resolution version of the same mesh.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

5 Comments

  1. This was actually very refreshing article. I already knew how to bake normals, but this introduction was so complete, that it was nice to read it. Yes, reading was also refreshing, because everybody can not make good videos either. Some videos could be just 1 minute long but still they take 10 mins.

    Great job.

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×