In this tutorial, I will show you how to bake a normal map from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly mesh using a cage
The keys I am using are in the lower-right corner of the viewport
I have a very simple low-poly and high-poly mesh of a plank of wood
I want to bake the high-poly normals so I can use them on the low-poly mesh as a normal map
I also need to unwrap the low-poly mesh
I start by duplicating the low-poly mesh so I can use it as a cage
I will unhide the high-poly mesh and in edit mode, I will scale the cage so it surrounds the high-poly mesh
I will use ALT S in this case so I scale along the normals
I need to look around the cage to make sure I don’t have any of the high-poly mesh poking through
Back in object mode, I unhide the low-poly mesh
I split my viewport and open the shader editor and the UV editor
I make a new UV and give it a name
I add an image texture node and open the UV map – changing the color space to non-color
In order to bake a normal map, I need to use the cycles render engine
so I change the render engine under the render properties tab
I select the high-poly mesh and then the low-poly mesh
Under the bake panel, I choose normal for the bake type
I check “selected to active” and twirl open the panel
I check “cage” and choose my cage for the cage object
I make sure the image texture node is active on both meshes and click on “bake”
I save the normal map
I hide the high-poly mesh and the cage and give the low-poly mesh a base color
I add a normal map node and connect it to the principled shader
I then open the normal map for the image texture and connect it to the normal map
Now I can see my normals from the high-poly being displayed on my low-poly mesh
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