In the third part of this step-by-step game modeling series I’ll show you how to bake a normal map for the knife using Blender.
I’ll also be showing you the steps for baking the normal map in 32-bit to avoid the color banding that the default 8-bit bakes produce. Then we’ll save the normal map as a 16-bit png file. This avoids color banding and gives you high quality normal map files. These files can then be converted to 8-bit in software like photoshop and instead of color banding the final result will have dithering instead, which looks much nicer than the banding.
Shout out to Aidy Burrows and Martin Turner for helping me sort out some info for this tutorial!