Removing polygon grid from displacement map?

Question

Is there a way to remove the squares that show up when baking a displacement map in Blender Internal when baking from a high to a low poly object?

For example,

Blender Internal generated displacement map:

zBrush generated displacement map:

A grid that follows the uv shape is created on the Blender displacement map. In Maya there was a way to smooth uvs to get rid of the squares. Is there something similar in Blender? I rendered an example of a zbrush displacement map without the grid as an example.

Blend file:

Answer 1

In this case the grid effect on the map was caused by the amount of geometry on the low poly object.

To remove the grid effect on a baked map (cycles/BI):

1. On the low poly object, Modifiers >> Add Modifier >> Subsurf >> use the default >> apply
2. Create image for the map: UV Image Editor >> Create new (choose wanted size and rename), select the new image in the Node Editor so it is active
3. Select high poly, low poly, go to edit mode so uvs are visible
4. BI: Render >> Bake >> Bake Type: (choose map type, ex. Displacement), [x] Normalized, [x] Selected to active, [x] clear, Distance: (choose distance, ex. 0.18), Bias: (ex. 0.125, usually about 50-70% of the distance number), Margin: optional (default is ok) (should also work in cycles with cycles defaults)
5. Bake (without grid)! :D

If your object has less polys you may have to up the subsurf modifier to level 2 instead. My low poly had 1008 quads in this case and lv 1 worked to remove the grid. Also as a side note, in zbrush I started to have the grid appear again at higher poly counts (at the equivalent of a level 3 subsurf) for the low poly so it is kind of a test what poly count works best for the map problem. Usually about 4-5k poly is a good number to bake from to avoid the grid.

Example of fixed Blender displacement map: