I have a material that does some procedurally-generated bump mapping, and I want to bake the results to a texture to improve render times. However, I’ve found that baking a normal map seems to produce artifacts regardless of what I do! To illustrate, I’ve made an incredibly simple object without any bump mapping at all, which has normals that look like this:
I’m not trying to bake the normals from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly mesh, just bake the normals from a single object to a texture. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to use the “Selected to Active” option, so my baking settings are incredibly simple:
However, despite the incredible simplicity of my setup, I find the baked normal map has lots of very visible artifacts:
I’m not sure what to do about this. Most of the questions I’ve seen about baking normal maps suggest adjust the settings in the “Selected to Active” panel, but as described above, I only have one object. Is there any way I can bake these normal maps without getting such visible artifacts?