3dsmax Ambient Occlusion bake problem

Marcus_Aseth

Hi guys,I waited 2 days and attempted to solve this by myself,watching several videotutorials and doing many bakes,but the problem still persist so I need your help

I was trying to bake the AO of my weapon in 3ds max 2014 using mental ray and the last attempt I've done was following this tutorial.
Now,my cage set up is just perfect,since I fine tuned it by hand multiple time until I got a perfect bake of the normals,also the overlapping face in my unwrap are out from the 0-1 space.
The problem is that even if I assign to my object the Obj.Channel 30 in the G-Buffer and then I put the -30 in the Incl./Escl. Obj ID in the Ambient/Reflective Occlusion,I still get my low poly (wich should be used only as a cage) baked down into the AO in the parts where it goes outside the highpoly.
Btw,I am not judging the max preview window,I know is not reliable during the bake to texture,I am opening the .tga in photoshop.

Please help me,I am kind of stucked with this situation

low odor

Maybe Try resetting the xform on your low poly mesh? probably be easier to diagnose if you posted your maps.

also istead of messing with AO materials and gbuffer settings..why not just use the MR AO bake option in the Render to Texture dialogue...you could use the same method as in this 3dmotive tut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYBBt1utWb0

Keep in mind he is not projecting from a high in the video..you just have to make sure you projection is turned on in the RTT dialogue

hope that helps

Marcus_Aseth

why not just use the MR AO bake option in the Render to Texture dialogue...you could use the same method as in this 3dmotive tut

Already tryied both yesterday,with the same resoult.

I have done the MR AO method once more to show you guys the problem,as you can see in the image below the mirrored uvshells are outside of the baking 0-1 space,also in the image below that, you can see the AO I am getting out of it (low samples, spread:1,5 ; max dist: 3),on the right the grey is the HP model,the yellow is the low poly,and as you can notice the pattern inside the red square is the same where my lowpoly is on top of the highpoly.
Also for this last test I resetted the Xform as you suggested,and is not using the cage for the bake,instead is using an Offset:10 under Projection option->Method.

So basically the only thing fucking up my ao bake is this low poly wich want to appear on the bake at all costs...what am I doing wrong?

Butthair

I think you need to hide your lo poly. I haven't done RTT in awhile, but I think that's what I always did. I assume your projection is pointing to all hi poly bits and the RTT is set up to be reference the lo poly as the bake set.

It's odd if your normals come out fine but your Ao doesn't with the same setup.

Marcus_Aseth

Well,that's not really an option,even if you can select an hidden object trough the Select from Scene pannel,Render to Texture don't "see" it as selected thus don't allow you to do anything (all is greyed out)

So the question stays:why is the low poly with projection baking himself into the AO? :poly122:
Is this a 3dsmax 2014 new "feature"? And how to work around this? :poly141:

madmex

Try adding a push modifier on you high poly mesh, then re-bake the AO.

madmex

Try adding a push modifier to your high poly mesh, then re-bake your AO.

RavenTheBird

select your low poly

right click and select "Objects Property"

Go to "mental ray" tab, and select "Pass Through (Invisible from FG)"

if you use GI, select exclude from GI both <---- Im too lazy to remember the name

hope it help

Marcus_Aseth

Done it,but nothing to do,still the same identical resoult

tynew

Why don't you bake your AOs in Knald? Do it while it's still in open beta.

Marcus_Aseth

I don't know that program,what does it do? Is for bakes like Xnormal?

tynew

https://www.knaldtech.com/

It uses your gpu to bake which only takes a couple of minutes compared to tens of minutes. You just input your normal map and you can bake a HP AO from it, if you input your mesh also you can bake a LP AO from that too.

Besides that though, why is your cage so close to your geometry? Might be why your getting those errors.

Marcus_Aseth

I just tried it,is super fast indeed but the resulting AO is not good enough compared to what I get from a proper ao bake in max,in the image below inside the red square you can see what AO Knald is giving me from the normal map in that round piece (I just pushed it to 150% to make it better visible),there is like a white X on top of that round piece wich doesn't make sense(and is also losing a shitload of detail,even if you watch the super low quality ao bake of the same piece in the previous reply)...I think my only option is to go back to max 2012,where I never had problem baking an Ao

joeriv

Maybe this works:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1881495&postcount=3

And if not:

Have you tried rendering with scanline?

Just add a skylight (and turn off all other lights) in your scene (and turn the color to white, standard it has a bit of a blue tint), enable light tracer.
Then add lighting map to your bakes, and bake.

It's not the best quality, but good enough for texturing purposes.


Another option if you want a nice AO, you already have your high/low and cage, just export those and bake in Xnormal.

Marcus_Aseth

I had already attempted all of those suggestions 2 days ago

If you untick Renderable on the lowpoly,then when you launch the render to texture it finish in an instant and you get only black.
Xnormal with cage worked for the most,but give some crazy unknown artifact in some parts(parts where max just bake down perfectly),insted using the ray distance calculator (400s of calculation) just produced an artifact map.
Scanline quality,as you said (and as was proved from the several bake I've done), is not the best quality,and I am very reluctant to go down to compromise when it comes to quality.
So now I think that the best option is a bake in max 2012,where I neve had any problem over many bakes.
I'll let you know how it turns out,for now thanks for your help guys

Noors

Put visibility of your LP to 0 in the object properties. Indeed unchecking renderable doesnt work, my bad on this.

Marcus_Aseth

omg I don't know how to thank you Noors,it worked!
The solution was so simple yet no tutorial I watched talked about this xD
Love you,thanks man

Ghogiel

when people say they hide the LP mesh for the MR bakes, what they usually mean is they are hiding the faces in the sub object level, not hiding the object itself.

Go into editable poly> face selection> edit geometry> hide selection. I seem to recall having to use face selection and not element selection, or it could be vice versa. But my senses say it was face selection.