Grainy looking ambient occlusion maps in xNormal

dreamparacite

Hello again, I've posted about this before and thought I fixed it but the problem is still persisting, having issues getting good quality AO maps in xNormal when using only low-poly models (as opposed to projecting detail from a highpoly to lowpoly model). No matter the settings I tweak the ambient occlusion bake looks bad when multiplied onto the mesh's texture.

http://imgur.com/a/5GW7k <-- Album showing the issues

I understand some of my UV stacking could have issues, but it looks bad even on geometry that is totally flat and not overlapping in any way. Is there a way to get nicer looking shadows that I don't feel the need to manually blur out to fix? I've tried AO planes/cages/hemispheres and the results are the same. Thanks for reading!

Vailias

Your anti-aliasing is set to 1x. That will greatly impact the grainyness. Turn that up.

As for the horrible artifacts: Those look like its shading along some lines of geo, which suggests things aren't perfectly planar there, or at least the normals across those polys aren't.

Why not just project from a high poly?

dreamparacite

These images are from the most recent bake, it is still 2048x2048, has 1024 rays and now 2x anti-aliasing, and it still looks off. And the edges are shown in picture 2, it's rectangular and should be flat, there's just some edges that connect to the corner because n-gons. Both images have the same AO map, it's just in the second one it's multiplied onto a darker BG color and it brings out the artifacts.

Lastly can't project from a high poly because there isn't one, it's just a low-poly frame for a freezer.

Vailias

Well in this case I'd suggest you bake the AO to vertex colors, then bake then either use the model with vertex colors or bake the vertex colors to a map. You'll likely get smoother results and a much lower bake time. They won't be pixel perfect, but you don't have a lot of pixel level detail in there anyway.

Also, just a thought, but why bake AO on this in the first place? If its just a freestanding, rectilinear prop, even a high quality AO map is going to be fairly simple anyway. It would be faster and more easily controlled using photoshopped gradients.

rexus

it look like a problem with the projection cage try look at the making me hard thread