Ambient Occlusion Baking Out Highlighted Edges On Every Edge

Surfur

This is driving me mad. Just as the title states. I've been using this same workflow for ages now without any issues or hold ups, but for some reason out of the blue it decides to mess up on me.

I get this..



From this..



And here's a quick render



I've tried resetting the xform, i've tried baking out in 3ds max as well as xNormal. I've tried with different smoothing group options. I've tried just pure flatten mapping the object. Haven't been able to make any difference

Please polycount this is driving me nuts!

VeeJayZee

Just an idea: Try to have a fairly high res version of it just to fix the face normals. It really gets wonky when I try any AO bakes with the target and source is the same geometry. It gets worse and unpredictable if you have a complex organic geo such a this.

CheeseOnToast

In Xnormal, changing the AO distribution from "uniform" to "cosine" reduces these artifacts quite a bit when you're baking from low poly to low poly.

garriola83

are you using the skylight technique or mental ray? maybe try mental ray to bake your AO, that means no skylight in the scene

Acumen

Hey there, I had the same exact problem every once in a while on some cheap lowpoly models of mine and if I remember exactly I even asked the question here on polycount.

What fixes it for me in the end is a mixture of doing a x-form reset, merging it into a new scene AND what seems to actually do the trick is scale the model up or down. I'm by no means a technical guy on such topics but it seemed to be a matter of having the model to big or small in 3dsmax. Go really crazy on the scaling and see if it makes a difference. I can't promise of course, but for me it worked. Fingers crossed it does for you, too

garriola83

^yes that works too. I used to get this a lot and I would reset the computer and sometimes it works but its hit or miss. Reimporting it into a new scene works from what i remember.

projectinfinity

I may be 5 years late on this topic but anyhow... I tried rescaling/resetting X-Form/re-importing my mesh but to no avail... BUT!... the thing that worked for me was adjusting the 'Spread' value... I found on my specific model, anything above 1.0, the edges start showing in the render... but its all good set at 1.0 !.. Not sure whether this setting will benefit other meshes but worth a shot!