Hi there, I’m trying to get a set of doors and windows baked onto a rectangular cube. The doors worked prior to shading them smooth, but after words I got some strange results and now it doesn’t show up on the normals at all.
The doors and windows I’m trying to bake onto a low poly object
The resulting normal map texture file
Thanks for any and all help.
Seeing you normal map (purplish) my first impression that it looks strange.
The wall goes from dark (left) to light (right) purple. Which means that the normal of the wall changes, giving a strange bending surface (see grey image). The outcome should be one single color of purple. Where the tiny details (doors | windows) have different purplish colors.
Help us all to help you.
Please give full screenshots with any questions. With the relevant panels open.
This can be done by Blender itself, via the ‘Window’ menu bar top left-hand side.
On that menu dropdown is ‘save screenshot’.
Which lights are you using at the time of baking (if any) and which view are you using? Well, as @FedPete said, a screenshot with the settings pane will help 
I tried that with the settings you posted but it didn’t seem to change much. I’ll post screenshots of the attempts I tried.
I tired seeing what would change by adding the “mapping” node block you shared and didn’t see a difference.
In this one I tried with the nodes you suggested with it plugged into roughness. I did notice a slight shift but that may have been the texture resetting on the mesh.
Finally, I tried this with a light added as Megane had suggested and I didn’t notice a difference.
I tried putting in a lot of time into geometry nodes to see if I could learn how to distribute these door meshes along a specific set of vertices, but I didn’t seem to find that information for exactly what I wanted so I decided to use an array with the door objects instead.
I applied the array modifier to the objects, and then joined the door objects to the mesh I wanted to bake from. I originally wanted to try and combine the door/window meshes with a Boolean modifier to the copied motel object but when I tried to combine more than one of the door arrays the original mesh disappeared from my viewport. So, I chose to simply join the door/window meshes to the copied motel cube I want to bake from.
I’ll play around with some more settings and see what results I get. I think I started working on this one after my last final and my brain power had been used up for that day.
Thanks for the help! Hopefully, I’ll find a solution soon!
Because a flat surface should have one single color, while you normal map does contain a gradient. Implying a curved (smoothed) surface.
Yes I had the surfaces smoothed! I think that’s where the problem was because once I shaded them flat it went back to how I wanted it!
It was a silly mistake, haha.
