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This method relies on the meshes sharing a UV space so that when you render a texture on one, it can be used on another. You can always transfer the UV from your low poly to high poly mesh via Nearest Surface or Raycasting. Or another method would be to take the low poly object, subdivide it until its as dense as the high poly (non-smooth subdiv, not subsurf), transfers the attribute you want to bake with Nearest Surface, then bake to itself.

@@aVersionOfReality Just fyi I wrote and maintain a baking extension for blender. So I'm always interested in ways to get around the limitations of cycles baking. OSL can help a bit, but those shaders execute so slowly. I'm currently writing an extension to bake animation data and I'm looking to use EEVEE, because while cycles is quick enough for a couple of textures, its way too slow when you want a few 1000 frames!

@ Ah, yeah makes sense

Yes, this is essentially the problem being solved here, but on a vertex level. To do it in the renderer, you'd need something like a custom Render Target or Layer that has the Normals of one object (probably in UV space), and then uses them on the other. This is technically possible in Malt, or if you do most of your shader in the Compositor. But its not going to be very efficient or scale well to more objects. And I'm not sure it'd really accomplish anything over doing it on the vertex level. What I'd like to solve is if you can do a Normal Transfer on the GPU instead of CPU to save time. But that'd probably require something like a compute shader, which I don't know much about. A vertex shader isn't sufficient, and a fragment shader is the wrong step.

@@aVersionOfReality I basically have it set up to do what I wanted at least for a simple test, but the vectors are getting interpolated on the target even with edge split enabled (probably because of you only split island edges?). How can I modify it to get no interpolation on the transfer target?

@@netherby4335 I'm not sure, it'll depend on the details. But it'll involve using Face Corners as those don't interpolate.

@@aVersionOfReality I am using face corners. If I manually separate the faces in the UV layout, then it transfers them exactly. If my faces have merged verts in the UV layout then the tangents are interpolated at those points.

@@netherby4335 Then there's Point evaluation happening somewhere, hmm

Thank you! You are correct that UV tangents are very useful in GN. The issue is more that you don't specifically need to use the same sorts as are used in the shader. You can make much simpler+faster UV tangents in GN than these. They won't be Mikktspace compatible, but that only matters if you are trying to match a standard to use them in other programs. Normal maps need this, but geonodes uses of them wouldn't.

Thanks for the reply! I still haven't got around to making my flow maps for vellus hair or buzzcut scalp hair but now I will be concentrating on the "simpler+faster" bit when I try to implement my plans!

@@kes099 If you aren't already in Erindale's Discord server, that's the best place for Geonodes info (stack exchange is good too.)

@@aVersionOfReality Thanks for the heads up!

Only if the texture is UV mapped. Then it should be the same on both meshes.

Hello! There did not end up being a next video due to work and health issues. But I have not abandoned the topic. I am hoping to make some new, more streamlined tutorials or a course to better cover the whole topic and what comes next.

@@aVersionOfReality I saved the normal as an attribute in the geometry node, and then used your tangent space difference node group in the shader,I plug the pre-saved object normal to base normal,the UV_tangent to tangent, the GN_normal to custom normal , and the tangent space normal plug to the material output. Then I baked a tangent space normal map using the method in your another viedo about bake with EVEE, but it doesn't work when I apply the normal map to the object. Could you please tell me where the problem is, thank you!Although I got a decent normal map bake in Cycles, I want to konw how to bake it in Eevee.

@@LorinSean That sounds like it should be correct. You can email me the file and normal and normal map and I can take a look. email is in channel description.

@@aVersionOfReality Thank you very much for taking time to help me,I sent an email to you.

If they are based on a Normal saved to vertex data with geonodes, yes. The Normal from the Geometry Node in the shader will be based on the meshe's current state in world space so that doesn't work. If its an attribute it will. If you want to bake with a Normal Map too then you'll need to make UV Tangent in Geonodes as well (see my normal mapping video.)

Sounds like a problem with the displace mask?

Check if you've got the origin/bend center in the right place.

@@aVersionOfReality Yep, sure enough the origin was set to Eyes_mesh instead of the lattice empty. Thank you. :D

@@Dasher_The_Viral No problem, let me know if you have any other quesitons!

Have you checked for any object level scale transforms? You can email me your file to check (email is in channel description.)

@@aVersionOfReality I checked for scaling on the object and don't think I found any. I've sent you the project file. Sorry, still pretty new to Blender.

Yes. Although this series was made before Geonodes, and now you can make similar setups there too which have different pros/cons.

@@aVersionOfReality ok thank you

HAHAHAH When the freaking UV map start to move around the original mesh it just made laugh until now! holy dammit brother... Im feeling like spawning the Jet for the first time in gta! Amazing, Ill freaking watch every single video of ur channel, danggggggggggggggggggggg LOL My favourite blender channel from now on, period. thx a buuuuuuunch!

Thanks! I'm finally getting enough of a break from work to finish my methods and toolsets. So hopefully will have more info out soon.

Yes that should work fine as long as the textures matches the UV map you unwrap to.

@@aVersionOfReality Aight, Thanks.

It is essentially the same approach yes. And now with Geometry nodes, you can do much more than this or vroid.

Thanks! I have not tested this with the asset system, so I can't comment on that part.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Can you send me a clip or the file? My email is in the channel description.

You use the sample nodes now. It works the same, its just new nodes.

@@aVersionOfReality ooo thank you!

What issue are you having exactly?

I tried a lot, but I have a problem in the output part. Is it possible to send you the blender file? Please help me so that I can fix it. I have been struggling with this for two days.

@@ramtinas Yes, you can email me or DM me on twitter. Contact info is in the youtube channel description.

@@aVersionOfReality Can you give me an email address?

​@@aVersionOfRealityI barely completed 16 minutes of the video and after that I can't, how did you relate the input and output to the set model?😢😢😢😢😢😢

This specific sleeve would have been fine from MD for most typical uses, its just an example. (Although if you wanted a really clean normal transfer proxy mesh, it wouldn't have been optimal.) But more complex MD meshes, or other similar things often need retopo.

I'm not sure. I imagine there is with the new topo nodes, yes, but I haven't explored it. And you can get a UV tangent from a UV space mesh more easily than this, but it won't match Mikktspace (aka the standard used in shader nodes.) I'll hopefully be coming back around to this issue soon and will see if I can improve both the performance and better match MikkTSpace.

So I did a little looking in Blender’s source code and found the mikktspace.hh file. From what I can tell, Blender uses shortest diagonal rather than beauty when triangulating. It also says something about floating point causing slight differences which creates splits later on.

I tried commenting this earlier but it didn’t go through. So I did a little digging and found the mikktspace.hh file in Blender’s source code and found out a few things. Blender uses shortest diagonal rather than beauty when triangulating and it seems floating point errors can cause splits in the tangent or that’s how I understood it. Also, if you triangulate the mesh, the setup I mentioned earlier actually gives the same result that the tangent calculation node in the video gives, so I’m pretty sure then it can be interpolated properly.

Sounds like an issue in the modifier stack. Check the followup video, and that you don't have any object transforms. If you're still having issues, you can email me your file (email address in channel info)

@@aVersionOfReality yeah made sure to apply all object transforms apart from object origin, set the origin of the curve to be the same as the origin of the plane and the tilt on the curve is correct and has the plane running the right way. Only modifier I have attached is the curve modifier to the plane (not even putting the lattice modifier on it till I work out what is happening). That said I have found a method that does work for me, basically I just place the curve the lattice and the plane in the same location then created a linked duplicate of the plane without the modifiers attached and put it on a separate location of the work space, allows me to edit the duplicate and all changes get applied to the original with the modifiers attached.

It is, but you'll need to adjust the math to create the right shape. Which is not easy. That's why my later videos switch to a Normal Transfer based workflow, as its more adaptable.

@@aVersionOfReality all right, guess i have to go through each one of them and do exactly as you’re doing right

There's a download link to the full setup in the description. You can also send email me or DM on twitter and I'll help you out.

Do you mean you cannot rotate the empty object at all, or that it doesn't do anything?

Send me an email or twitter DM with more info and i'll try to help. Contact info is in channel description.

Oh, thank you :)

@@aVersionOfReality noo, thank YOU! Fantastic tutorial, as you imply in the video, you packed months of RnD into a tidy 90 min lesson. :)

Plug the Normals into a single defuse shader, then in Cycles bake a normal map as usual. Note though that Cycles can introduce some odd issues when making Tangent Normal Maps. There's starting to be better ways to do it (but these issues are with all cycles normal maps, not just this method.)

@@aVersionOfReality Thank you so much.

In some cases. Gen cords are based on the bounding box, and are pre-deformation. So depends if you want those things.

@@aVersionOfReality Interesting, anyways, amazing video as always 👍

Yes. Here's an article about translating this to Unity: panthavma.com/articles/shader-blender-to-unity/

Glad it worked! Remember, there's lots of different types of Matcap projection. That's why its hard to find any info. So the way I do it here may not necessarily match any other given method. The common thread for matcaps is that it uses camera info and usually Normals.

Oh no, you've caught me 🤣It was all a ruse.

Nevermind, I fixed immediately after posting this comment! I had plugged the "Driver: Scale" Node into the Vector math Scale instead of "Driver: Loc". It do be like that sometimes.

@@Xirszo It do be like that quite often actually :)

I am hoping to put out more videos that summarize this better, yes. Although nothing has really changed in geonodes beyond some node names, and goo doesn't really change this stuff either.

Its Subdivision Surface, so it gets called both. Sorry if that's confusing!

I am not. I should probably set that up.

Yes, good call. I forget to use it in the moment 😅