Baking on different objects

Good day

I am curently trying to bake the normal, shadow, AO and so on from object A (“rope”), onto object B (a pole).
Checked many tutorials, but I cant get it to work, so I am asking for some assistance.

What I am trying to achieve is, to make the pole have the textures, normals and such things baked onto it, as the rope that I made is way beyond a recomended poly count to be in a video game.

Bellow you see both objects on how they are placed and separated, so the diferent pieces are visible.

Side question, must the low poly object be inside or on the outside of the baked object?

Thanks =)



Have you created a material+texture for your low-poly mesh? I can’t tell from your screenshots exactly what approach you’re taking, or what sort of problem you’re experiencing.

Upload your .blend file for more informed responses.

Here is my file. I have isolated the thing mentioned above.

Like I said, i want the pole (low poly) object, to have the texture, normal … baked from the high poly rope. Many tutorials I saw stated that I just need to place them together, select the high poly then low poly object, check selected to active and it would bake/transfer the texture. Maybe I missed something or just didnt understand.

I think you should look around at how to bake textures in blender a bit more. A couple key things I’ve noticed right off the bat:

  • You haven’t UV unwrapped your low-poly mesh. You need to have a UV map associated with that mesh in order to bake.
  • You haven’t created a new image & texture to receive the baked result. (Go through a few tutorials and this will make more sense)

A couple other observations:

  • Your low-poly mesh is a bit messy, with some triangles in it. A low-poly mesh is normally quite clean. The high-poly will sometimes be dense and complicated, but that’s so you can get some nice details for the bake. I’d use a four-, six-, or eight-sided (rather than three-sided) extrusion along your rope to bake to. Still a massive reduction in polys.

  • Since this is a repeating pattern, it could be easier to only bake a smaller section of your rope and then do some Gimp/Photoshop work to tile those resulting bakes. That way you won’t need such large images to cover the entire surface.


I’ve added a sun lamp here to show the shading on the low-poly object as a result of the normal map. Note the “jaggies” caused by the relatively low resolution of the normal map. Using a tiled segment would increase the quality of this normal map dramatically. This is with an 8-sided extrusion, by the way, for the low poly.

Here’s the blend if you want to take a look at what I changed: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/39357

Thank you so much! I was on a poly limit, but did alot of tweaking, so a few more sides will be used instead of only 3. Also, I accidentaly triangulated the mesh and am in the process of cleaning up the entire thing=)