Rendering AO, Normal, and lighting information in maya

Laughing_Bun

This is sort of wierd, but I am rendering some UI elements and I need to render out an object in mental ray with a nice shader and lighting setup and then also render out a normal map of that object.

The problem is I have to bake the normal map and ao to a texture, and render the Mental Ray Color pass from a scene. Which means that I can't get the normal map to line up perfectly with the color map. It is always slightly skewed in some way.

I was wondering if anyone knew of a way I could set the cameras up to match perfectly for the projection, Or a way for me to render an object in mental ray as an object with normal map colors, Basically just a normal map shader that I can render out.

Might sound wierd but its how I am doing the UI so any help you can provide would be appreciated.

Thanks!

ivars

You can do this using render passes.
Just right-click on your render layer and add a new render pass. (You must use mental ray to render passes)
Add a Beauty and a Object Normal (Camera space) pass and render out the image. You can ofcourse add any pass you want, like AO.
In the render view you can now load the different passes.

Laughing_Bun

brilliant Ivars, thanks alot