Baking a normal map from a procedural material Blender Cycles

[VanillaSunsets]

Still struggling in Cycles here. I am making progress tho, I can now make a nice render, bake a decent diffuse texture and a pretty smooth AO map. Now I have hit another (I hope imaginary) wall....

I would like to bake a simple normal map from a procedural material. Nothing fancy, just metal with some rust spots on it. I want to upload that to SL like I did my normal maps that I baked in Internal. It bakes a flat normal map when I try to do this. To me it seems you can only bake normals from high to low poly in Cycles? I did not create a high poly coz I simply do not need one. It is a simple object, no small details that would need a high poly version. I want to fake the little detail it has (the rust) with some displacement and bake that to a normal map. I know I can make a normal map in other software, like Crazybump or Gimp, but that would give me less control to fine tune it.

Am I missing something, is there a way around this?

[Codex Alpha]

Thank you for asking this question, as I was seeking to do the same thing myself, as I am using more Cycles now getting out of the Blender Render realm finally.

I found this article on Blender Stack Exchange that answers the question nicely, with node setups.

---

VanillaSunsets wrote:

I would like to bake a simple normal map from a procedural material. Nothing fancy, just metal with some rust spots on it. I want to upload that to SL like I did my normal maps that I baked in Internal. It bakes a flat normal map when I try to do this.

---

"When you bake the normal map, you are converting the XYZ component of each surface's point normal vector into the correspective RGB color (according to the type of calculation: object, tangent..)

It is something that is not related with textures or shading, just geometry.

The result is correct, every point of your surface has a normal pointing out (local Z axis). That's where the blueish color is coming from (XYZ=>RGB)."

- Normal Pass Is Generated From Face's Normal Vector

 

---

VanillaSunsets wrote:

To me it seems you can only bake normals from high to low poly in Cycles? I did not create a high poly coz I simply do not need one. It is a simple object, no small details that would need a high poly version. I want to fake the little detail it has (the rust) with some displacement and bake that to a normal map. I know I can make a normal map in other software, like Crazybump or Gimp, but that would give me less control to fine tune it.

Am I missing something, is there a way around this?

---

"What you probably are trying to bake is the Color of the Normal Map. Maybe you have combined several maps or some of them are a procedural textures converted with the bump node...

What you need to do is to bake the Emission Pass (one of the fastest to bake you'll need just 1 sample, as with SSS Color, Glossy Color, Diffuse Color...) of an Emission shader with Strength=1 that has the color you want in input"

- Example of baking the Normal from procedural textures

I followed this setup myself baking out an Emit instead, though my colors were not the same blue-shaded result (I'll have to figure out why that is);



It still works inworld on a default cube, however. The cube on the left is bump only, the right has default Specular applied;



Hope that helps, as it certainly has helped me. I could use Crazybump, or GIMP as well, but I'm trying to learn Blender inside and out, and keep it all 'in-house' if possible.

If you find any new information on this, or find a better way, please get back to me.

Good luck!

[arton Rotaru]

---

entity0x wrote:I followed this setup myself baking out an Emit instead, though my colors were not the same blue-shaded result (I'll have to figure out why that is);

---

I'm no Blender user, but it looks like you forgot to change the Space under Bake > Normal Setting from object to tangent.

[Codex Alpha]

Yes, not sure why I get this result, as I am following the node setup in the tutorial, which seems to make sense, but the resultant image is not what I expected (please refer to images in the article). Thanks for the tip though, I will watch for that in other instances.

[Drongle McMahon]

Perhaps I have misunderstood the porblem here, because I find no obstacle to baking out the normal map that contains the normals generated by applying a procedural texture to the diusplacement input of a Material Output node. Here is an example setup. The image "Untitled" is selected in the node editor so that that is where the baked normal map goes. The 3D view is in "Rendered" mode, to reveal the displacement effect. The inset at lower left is the same cylinder with blank texture, pink color and the baked normal map applied.



[Codex Alpha]

Dunno, hope she gets back to us about these replies...