Cavity Map won't bake

I am trying to bake a cavity map, and I followed all instructions to a tee, but my texture map is entirely black when I do the bake. I have used this method before, and it worked, but I don’t have the slightest clue what’s going on this time. This is starting to annoy me.

I cannot find the solution on the Wiki’s.

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Although you’ve copied every instruction to the letter. There are always some irregularities. Not using the same Blender version, your Orc has a different scale (did you apply scale?), your Orc has a different mesh, your low poly is different, etc.

Try, when following these steps, not as a click and do instruction. But, learn what all those individual actions do on your model and how you need to adapt the properties used to your model.
It’s not do re-mesh, but I want to perform a re-mesh and what is the best option in my object situation at that moment.

General Q&A note

Help us all to help you.
Please give full screenshots with any questions. With the relevant panels open.
Also, include the lecture time and name/number that is relevant to the problem/issue.
This can be done by Blender itself, via the ‘Window’ menu bar top left-hand side.
On that menu dropdown is ‘save screenshot’.

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I had difficulties with baking the normal maps perfectly before I found a solution. I am going to provide a series of steps and images for this. We are going to make what’s called a “cage” and what this does is it helps contain details and better projects them on the map (like a parameter so the details don’t get lost).

First, duplicate the low-poly model, but don’t move it anywhere just right-click. Now rename the duplicate using the “F2” button on the keyboard and rename it “cage.”

Next, go to edit mode of the cage and select all the vertices. With all the vertices selected press “alt” and “s” together. What this will do is increase the size of the cage along the normals (like inflating a balloon). Increase the size of the model so it is completely covering the high-resolution model, but not so big that the faces are too far apart from the high-resolution model. (see pictures below)

Before:

After:

Just make sure that you don’t have vertex snapping on or else this will change the face count and it won’t let you bake (speaking from experience).

Now, you may have some parts of high-resolution still showing through like this:

Just grab the vertex, edge, or face to cover it up (this may take some time). After you have inspected the model and made sure there are no more spots of the high-resolution model showing, go to the “render properties” tab:

cavity bake help 4

Check “selected to active”, check “cage”, and in the “cage object” section, select the cage. I put “0.02 max ray distance” just to be safe. To bake, just select your low-poly and the high poly as you did before (and make sure all the proper nodes are selected) and bake. This also can help straighten out any errors the normal map had (though it requires to bake again). Let me know of the results. I am happy to answer any other questions you may have.

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hi there, your post came like a blessing! just yesterday i had the exact same problem as here described Cavaty map - Blender Courses / Show - GameDev.tv
it took me quite some time to come to this point. and in this community i get so many good answers on my many questions.

this description helped me very much!

this is now my render view from the low poly after aplying by this method.
the handa and ears still have some issues, maybe i go later back and fix it, second time it will be more easy and its a good repetition. but for now i go on.

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i tried this cage baking now some time. and it does not work for all the parts. dont know why. but the teeth actually look worse with cage. i assume it has to do with the overall seize of the part… AND for a modell with many parts, it just takes to uch time(at least for me) to make a cage for every part…
so i continued my research and found this video
(2) Texturing Stylized Faces - Blender 3 - YouTube here at 8:28 grant explains about baking in emit. dont know what it does, but it works!

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