How to bake a normal map in Blender

A normal map lets a light mesh catch light as if it had every wrinkle of the detailed one. You make it once, by projecting the high-poly garment onto the low-poly one.

What you need

• Blender
• A high-poly and a low-poly version of the garment in the same place
• The low-poly version unwrapped

Steps

1. Switch to Cycles. Baking lives in the Cycles render engine. Choose it in the Render properties.
2. Give the low-poly an image. In the low-poly's material add an Image Texture node, create a new image (2048 px, 32-bit float off, colour space Non-Color) and leave that node selected.
3. Select high, then low. Click the high-poly, shift-click the low-poly so it is active.
4. Set up the bake. In Render properties > Bake set Bake Type to Normal, tick Selected to Active, and set a small Extrusion (or use a cage) so the rays start just outside the low-poly.
5. Bake and save. Press Bake, then save the image from the Image editor - Blender does not save baked images by itself.
6. Check it. Connect the image through a Normal Map node and look at the low-poly in rendered view. Fix black or broken patches by raising the extrusion or adjusting the cage.

Tips

• Shade the low-poly smooth before baking, and bake with the same smoothing it will have in the world.
• Second Life and most game engines read OpenGL normal maps (green up), which is what Blender bakes.
• Bake at a larger size than you need and scale down: it hides small errors.

Next

• How to bake ambient occlusion in Blender
• How to make PBR materials for Second Life

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.