Baking Normal maps in Blender
We will now learn to bake normal maps in Blender using the Cycles render engine. Baking is the process of saving attributes such as color, roughness, or even bumpiness into an image that can be exported or used elsewhere. The features on the surface in Figure 5.17 can be baked into a normal map image so that it can be used to simulate the same features, without actually creating them as a 3D surface. This method will allow us to simulate highly detailed surfaces without increasing the polygon count of our scene.
Figure 5.17 – Surface details
These features are easy to replace with a normal map because they are quite close to the surface, and they appear as bumps rather than separate objects. In the following steps, we will turn these surface details into a normal map:
- Add a plane right above the surface with the details.
Figure 5.18 – Adding a plane above the surface with...
