Table of contents

Introduction

Normal maps are a good way to get additional detail to the model without adding additional geometry to it. In this tutorial I will show how to bake normal maps in Blender 2.8 for UE4 and how to use them in UE4.

If you feel that you are pretty well familiar with a blender and UE4 and you don't want to read this whole thing, there is a really short version near the end of this article. Click here to get there faster.

Also, there is video at the end where I show the whole process.

Prerequisites

Blender 2.8 or newer installed. (As I am creating this tutorial, I am using Blender 2.8 beta version, but it should not differ much in a stable release or newer versions.)

I am using Unreal Engine 4.22, but older versions also should work.

Basic knowledge of how to use Blender and UE4.

Normal map bake in Blender

Mesh creation

First we need to have 2 meshes.

Low poly mesh - for which we will bake a normal map

High poly mesh - more detailed mesh from which we will bake details to the normal map

For simplicity, we will use planes as our meshes.

So we will start with a new empty blender project. By default blender new projects will not be empty, so we will clean it empty.

I prefer to do that by once pressing A key, then pressing X and then accepting deletion by hitting Enter or by a mouse click.

key, then pressing and then accepting deletion by hitting or by a mouse click. Or just do that your way.

After then we will add the plane to our scene.

To add plane - press Shift + A and then in Mesh sub-menu select Plane

You should see just a plane in your scene now. Because we will have 2 planes, let's rename it to some meaningful name. I will rename it to LowPoly.

To rename - in the right upper corner in an Outliner double click on the Plane and change its name to LowPoly

After that, we will duplicate our existing plane and rename it as HighPoly

To duplicate - select existing plane and press Shift + D and complete with a right mouse click or Enter

Now we need to add details to our HighPoly mesh, so we could bake details in our normal map.