Blender: Distorted Surface Texture

I got some strange results rendering a surface texture for a cylinder the other day. Any idea what could be the problem?

Hard to say without more info, but my guess is the normal direction is facing inward, so it's not getting any light and you get the mostly black bake. CTRL-n will recalculate them.

You the man! Worked. I also found out how I ended up there by redoing step bake step bake.

Was starting out with a cylinder and the bake failed once I used warp on it. As You said as if turned inside out. Any clue if that is normal behavior?

It can be. When you offset the mesh from the cursor, it depends if you go to + or - on the axis whether normals will be inside or outside after applying warp.

Here are the steps that I did that led to the broken surface texture.

Make cylinder

rotate: r x 90
rotate: r 90
stretch x
warp along y

bake fails every time

You can enable "Draw Normals" in the "Mesh Tools More" panel to check whether they are correct or not. If you see the little blue lines jump to the inside, abort the warp and change the view to the opposite side (as view direction also affects the warp). So if you are on top view (numpad 7) and it goes inside, abort and switch to bottom view (shift numpad 7) and it'll be ok.

thank You very much that was great advice!