Trying to bake a normal map but get blotchy textures

Question

I'm new to baking normal maps within Blender and I'm trying to get a glitch-less, blotchy-less bake. However, this is what I keep getting from it:

Here is my current settings for the scene:

Scene Hierarchy:

The cage is slightly bigger than the rest of the models involved. As you can see I've also selected the high poly first and then the low poly.

Here's my material node for it:

As you can also see, this has been applied to the low poly model.

Finally, here are my settings for the bake:

What you cannot see in this image is that it's set to Cycles and the feature set is pointing to Supported.

I'm not sure how I can get it to look the way a normal map should at this point.

EDIT:

Here's the file:

You need to increase you max ray distance, you're trying to bake a building model and only have the rays casting out 1mm that's probably not going to be enough. — Jakemoyo, Commented Jul 8, 2022 at 19:31

moonboots · Accepted Answer · 2022-07-08 19:59:39Z

1

There are 2 things here in my opinion:

Put the Max Ray Distance at 0 as you don't want the ray to stop before scanning the surface of the low-poly
The cage won't scan a lot of things because baking the normals allows to save the orientation or tilt of the faces, if the faces are parallel or perpendicular to the low-poly normals nothing will be recorded, see the difference between picture 1 and 2 (1: nothing is baked, 2: the rays bake the faces that are tilted):

answered Jul 8, 2022 at 19:59

moonboots

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$\begingroup$ Sorry for the delay in getting back to you... So you're saying that because the faces are parallel with the cage(?) it won't bake properly? However, if I were to tilt the faces, it would? I'm just finding this a little confusing if I'm honest. $\endgroup$
– JamieRhys
Commented Jul 10, 2022 at 22:05
$\begingroup$ I'm saying that only the faces that are not completely parallel or perpendicular to the cage faces can be baked, yes $\endgroup$
– moonboots
Commented Jul 11, 2022 at 1:57
$\begingroup$ Baking the normals means baking the orientation of a face, how it is tilted, if the face that bakes has the exact same orientation, nothing will be baked $\endgroup$
– moonboots
Commented Jul 11, 2022 at 2:52
$\begingroup$ So to be sure, what you see in the normal map, is this how it should look? $\endgroup$
– JamieRhys
Commented Jul 11, 2022 at 8:51
$\begingroup$ yes, actually as most of the faces you're trying to bake are parallel or perpendicular to the faces of the cage, you have almost nothing baked, you need to tilt a bit the faces of your high-poly if you want to bake something $\endgroup$
– moonboots
Commented Jul 11, 2022 at 9:04

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