Joining hipoly objects into one before baking...

llavigne  I haven't taken this course but I believe if you have multiple objects intersecting and you bake, you will end up baking the shadows caused by the overlaps.

Joining the objects won't fix that but if you explode them (i.e. move them away from each other so they don't interfere with each other's lighting) then that should make a better bake. I would make a separate file to play around with though until you get what you like.

See if that helps.

May be worth posting a picture of what you are trying to accomplish.

Per the tutorial, I sorted the lopoly objects and hipoly objects into collections so that no objects were intersecting. Jonathan joined lopoly objects into a single object inside of each collection but that wasnt done for the hipoly objects. 

When I was baking the normal map, if you leave all of the hipoly objects separate, the texture bake progress bar goes from 0 to 100% and then starts over. It does this multiple times. Im guessing its baking the normal map for each hipoly object. If you join all of the hipoly objects into one object in each collection, the texture bake progress bar goes from 0 to 100% once and thats it.

I'm still getting an issue where the progress bar just sits at 0% for a long long time, but this issue exists for both situations so its probably a different issue, unrelated to whether I join all of the hipoly objects into one for each collection. Not sure what thats about.   (sorry for the long winded post)

llavigne  ahhh okay. Yeah I believe that 0-100% over and over again is correct in that it is baking multiple objects or multiple materials/shaders in a 1 per pass sort of sense.