Blender 2.8 / BAKING NORMAL MAP / SHADING / HARD EDGES

Greetings, folks! In this tutorial we are baking a normal map for meshes with different shading. General steps for baking a normal map: 1. Create a cage object with your low-poly mesh. Displace it as to let it cover both high-poly and low-poly mesh. Use Displace modifier. 2. Mark all angled hard-edges as UV-seams. 3. UV-unwrap your mesh. 4. Keep your UV-islands proportional and as big as possible. 5. Set Margin between UV-islands to . If it does not help, try a different value. Not too close, not too far. 6. Create a high-resolution 32-bit texture with color space Non-Color. 7. Set Margin to 64px for 8K, 32px for 4K accordingly. 8. Select the high-poly mesh first, then the low-poly. 9. Select the texture-node for baking. 10. Hit Bake. Here’s the blend-file with meshes and normal maps from the tutorial: One of the examples is based on one from this video: