Having trouble with normal/ao map baking.

JordanN

I just watched some tutorials, practiced 3 times and I'm tired so I'm resorting to help.

Baking maps in 3DS Max, I followed the procedure. No overlapping UV's, the UV channel is correct, there's a high poly and a low poly mesh, low poly mesh is selected. I created a cage and have gave it a lot of room to project. Skylight is turned on. I'm shooting a ton of rays (500) with lots of padding (5).

Yet, I'm getting this.


Here are the bakes


The mesh in question (cage)


Wireframe of the mesh (the hi-poly is blue)

Eric Chadwick

You will get no AO from a highpoly model that has no creases or cavities. Unless you put a "floor" under it.

The normal map won't show in the render unless you're using a Normal Bump map type, and make sure to set the Bump Channel strength to 100 (default is 30 in a Standard material).

Are you using a different Smoothing Group per UV element? For a cube with those UVs you really only need 3 SGs, but that's not really necessary.

JordanN

Yeah, it was smoothing groups causing it. I was using autosmooth before but now I made each UV island their own. I also used the normal maps node instead of just plugging the map directly into bumps.


Here's what I got now: