MR AO bake vs scanline AO bake in Max?

Valandar

Okay, I HAVE been baking AO maps in the scanline renderer - add in a skylight set to pure white, turn on Light Tracer, and bake a "Complete" map, with the under figure set to a white, 2-sided default material.

When using the MR AO bake technique is it faster? More detailed (the scanline version only has the most extreme grooves and shadows) ? Otherwise better?

AlecMoody

I bake mine in vray. I know its more detailed and quicker/smoother than what I have been able to get from the scanline. I would assume that if you knew mental ray well it would be a similar case.

Kitteh

I always bake my AO with just the scanline renderer, mostly default settings. I place a skylight, set it to cast shadows, raise or lower the bias for bigger or sharper shadows, then do a ShadowsMap with render to texture and paste it over my diffuse set to multiply.

Rumkugel

also using the scanliner set up.
sometimes i crank up the samples, but usually i render out the double size, and size it down.
works fine.

Valandar

Okay, tried both on the same object.

The end result I get is that the MR bake tends to be more detailed, while the Scanline bake tends to have a stronger result (except on areas where two objects are practically touching, they're black on both).

Time wise, it's about the same, depending on the number of samples you use for MR. 128 seems to equal a "normal" Scanline bake.

MoP

One big difference should be that if you have dual or quad cores, Mental Ray should be much faster since it can use more than one core. The scanline renderer only ever seems to use one (unless they've changed that since Max 2008 ).

Bokaja

Wel in max 2009 the render is 100% on my dual core system when using scanline so guess they improved that