xNormal AO Artifacts

Brandon.LaFrance

Getting some headaches with baking AO maps from xNormal. Using default settings, my maps have strange wavy gradients where they should be smooth and even. My normal maps are baking perfectly, so I have a feeling my high res and low res meshes are set up properly. Maybe there's something wrong with my AO bake settings, but honestly, those parameters might as well be written in Arabic, for all I know.

Advice?

kurt_hectic

Add more samples\rays?

Click "..." near AO checkbox and add some Rays. try 64, then 128 and check if it helped.

EarthQuake

yeah, up the samples, to like 1024.

Brandon.LaFrance

Awesome, thanks for the quick fix. Default was 128. 512 was sufficient for me to get clean results, but holy hell the render times went through the roof. Starting to wish I bought an i7 when I built this rig.

MM

512 seems reasonable and put anti-aliasing to 1x. also make sure to turn on jitter, it should take care of any stepping issues but it is more noisy (you wont see the noise that much in final texture)

i usually render AO maps at double res of what ever i am working on and render with 1x AA then down scale. this basically gets me close to 2x AA result in half the time it takes to render 2x AA.

here is what i use most of the time:

EarthQuake

Yeah I do the double res thing too for ao. Also go into the task manager and set xnormal priority to low, then it won't bog your system down and you can continue working on other stuff, so the render time is less of an issue.

ZacD

Brandon.LaFrance wrote: »

Awesome, thanks for the quick fix. Default was 128. 512 was sufficient for me to get clean results, but holy hell the render times went through the roof. Starting to wish I bought an i7 when I built this rig.

You can use CUDA acceleration for AO. The option is called Optix-CUDA and it's much faster.

MM

EarthQuake wrote: »

Yeah I do the double res thing too for ao. Also go into the task manager and set xnormal priority to low, then it won't bog your system down and you can continue working on other stuff, so the render time is less of an issue.

yup, i actually set affinity so that all my CPU cores are not used up. i found that just freeing up 4 cores out of 12 (i73930k) was enough for me to be able to do other tasks comfortably.

*edit*
also, if you have extra money laying around (some people do...) you could invest it on an openRL card like this:

https://store.caustic.com/shop/hardware/

xNormal natively supports openRL acceleration.