I am creating game ready assets using Blender. I heard that it is a good practice to create both the high poly mesh and the low poly mesh for the asset, but instead to using a high poly mesh, one should bake the details of the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh. But I don't know the procedure of doing that.
The Problem
Here, I wish to create a piece of deformed wood in blender. So, I created a low poly cube and gave it a basic shape of a wood (no deformation)
Now, I created a high poly mesh and subdivided it a few times and then added a displace modifier with a cloud texture with 0.010 strength, which gave it a deformed kind of shape. Then I manually deformed it a bit using proportional editing which gave me this result.
Now, is there any way to bake these details of the high poly mesh to the low poly mesh and if not, then how can I give that low poly mesh a deformed shape (like the high poly mesh), without too many polygons?
Just a side note, I use Unreal Engine for game development.
EDIT:
I tried using the bake normals option in blender but it is producing several artefacts of mostly red, green and purple colours.
Those 'holes' in the lower right corner are causing artefacts in my low poly mesh. Is there any way to solve that? Otherwise the distorted portions are appearing fine.
@hatinacat2000 The requested .blend file
Result
I think @Christopher Bennett's method is the best. I was able to get this result using it. It's only 306 faces. There is a shading issue there, but it's just me bevelling wrong, leading to a triangle. Otherwise, its perfect. 306 faces is much better than 5000.