more mental mental ray baking issues in maya

SHEPEIRO

im getting problems baking out AO maps using mental ray in maya, basically it is refusing to capture high poly bits that go underneath/behind the low poly mesh, the same settings a re fine using mayas renderer to capture the diffuse/normals, does mentalray have different settings to this or is there a work round, sorry cant show you anything this is at work

katzeimsack

you are using transfehr maps...
it's shit

I don't think anybody managed to bake ao with it, because it's not only using the highpoly for the ao calculation but also the low...

The most common workaround is to bake the ao of the highpoly with batchbake (on a texture or the vertex color) and then just bake the baked ao on the lowpoly (bake diffuse)

bugo

Use Turtle plugin, best solution

CheeseOnToast

I seem to remember having some success with it by selecting and hiding both the lowpoly model and the envelope that belongs to it. Yes, it's stupid enough to include the envelope when baking AO.... When I say "hiding", I mean CTRL+H hiding, because sticking it in a layer and hiding that doesn't work either.

And yes, Mental Ray does work differently to the other transfer maps options, unfortunately.

ivars

AO with transfer maps is also pretty slow...

Turtle is quite expensive (about $1500)
You might wanna try xnormal. Great, quick results!

katzeimsack

transfer maps only uses one core ... so if you've got a multicore you should really use xnormal ..


and autodesk should get kicked in the ass for making transfer maps that shitty...
good idea, but bad execution...

SHEPEIRO

yep transfermaps is the arse, though i have no problems with the lighting, its the ray casting from low to high thats ballzed, ill give Xnormal another go, couldnt do large enough maps with it last time i tried it though at enough samples.

AO isnt as bad as plain diffuse renders, they seam to take forever with no lighting or nothink

thanks for the help guys, ps does xnormal render out diffuse from high to low

katzeimsack

yes

SHEPEIRO

good answer

SHEPEIRO

thanks for putting me on the xnormal root again, its sooooo much better than it used to be, and far beter than maya,

one issue im getting is baking out the diffuse, i get a few bits coming out correct but most of it is sheared, the uvs and obj space are fine, as all other maps come out correct,

also when i turn off "find nearest point on mesh" in the bake options i get nothing in the render???

any ideas?