AO Baking...

Haftoof

So I'm still relatively new, and I wanted to ask in terms of baking AO, are people using the bake straight out of xnormal? What modifications are they using?

Also here's the bake I'm looking at right now, but it seems... dark...

Snowstorm

What settings did you use? That doesn't look like an AO bake.

I don't use xnormal, but if I did I would use the AO bakes out of it without any modifications. AO bakes aren't the only bakes I use though.

Haftoof

Yeah... I noticed that it was really dark. I just used the default settings, then I looked around for other folks suggestions.

Do you need to set up lightning in some way for it? It seemed exceedingly dark and in comparison to the AO from nDo pulled from the normal map it seemed rather different.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Would a mirror'd UV map affect this? (mirrored down the length of the blade) I might not fight it and just use nDo's Normal 2 AO feature and go from there.

Swaggernaut

I mirrored UV may actually be a contributing factor to this issue. If your mirrored UV islands are not offsetted by 1 scale, you will be telling the program you are baking with to bake the AO map twice on the same island, making it darker than usual.

Haftoof

Well, I simply put the UV's where I wanted then mirror'd my geometry. Perhaps I need to bake the maps before I mirror the geometry? How would I offset the scale so that the AO is only baked on the 1 section then mirror'd over to the other?

Either way I might just use DDo to pull together the AO Maps... Seems it takes normal in and spits out decent AO that way I can learn the DDo workflow and also get my bakes all together.

Swaggernaut

What I mean by offset is that you offset the mirrored model's UV by 1 Uv grid; In other words, the mirrored model's UV are just 1 UV sheet to the right on the x-axis

Haftoof

Ahhh... so pull the UV's for the mirror'd half off the area for now, then move them back after the bake. Got it. Some searching and of course pior had a post somewhere on the forums to figure out what you meant.

Swaggernaut

Exactly.

Dilanka

Hope this helps

Haftoof

Followed what was suggested, tried tweaking the colors, still comes out extraordinarily dark. When I tried out the AO's from normal it was bright and showed the shadows I wanted. I'm still dumbfounded on why it isn't working compared to the AO's that others get.

I mean I'm gonna go with what works and honestly I need to learn nDo's workflow, but If anyone can help me figure out why it's turning out so dark I'd love to know. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious... the mirror'd Uv's didn't seem to affect it at all once I moved it.

belkun

Those aren't the default settings. Did you try clicking 'Defaults' to reset it? This is how it looks on my end with the default options:

Baddcog

Your lod model might need it's normals reset. 1 smooth group.

Haftoof

I tried default settings and I played with it a bit, but to no avail.

cog you'll have to explain what you mean with that, LOD being low poly?

Baddcog

Yep, If the normals aren't uniform they can give weird results.

Haftoof

I double-checked the normals by reversing them and everything appears to be in order.

Would it have anything to do with materials? I'll play with some of the attenuation settings and see if they help.


Found some reading that I need to do on xnormal settings. Hopefully I'll play with it tonight and figure it out otherwise I'll just go with quixel's map generator for the AO and play with settings to get what I want.

Insaneophobia

Did you export it straight from zbrush?
For AO maps I usually have to import the mesh exported from zbrush into another 3d program, like 3ds max for example, and export it out of that for the AO map to work correctly.
Maybe that could work for you as well?

Haftoof

Straight from zbrush. I'll give your idea a try, looks like maya won't like it but should handle it I think.

Insaneophobia

Then you should probably try using decimation master to decimate the mesh to a tenth of what it is now, then I'm quite certain you don't need a that high rez mesh for the bake. Just remember to save the decimated file as another zbrush project.

Haftoof

I may not, but it seems out of place that you would be required to do that just to accomplish AO's. I think it's probably just the settings (Scale maybe) and a few things because when I use Quixel to produce a map based on the normal it works out perfectly fine and looks solid in the model viewer. Now I'm pretty sure that quixel's map isn't an actual baked map based on a form of AO baking but derived from the normal map (which doesn't invalidate it as light mapping is light mapping) but we'll see.

Mostly just a learning experience but if it doesn't fly in the next hour after I get home I'm gonna pull it from Quixel Suite and just move forward with the sculpting for the lower half. I'll post my update tonight.

Insaneophobia

Yeah, dude I find it wierd as well, but somehow it works with my AO maps. I have no idea why I have to do it like that, but it works for me.

Haftoof

xnormal - Ignore per vertex color... I had this turned off for the polypaint diffuse once I turned it back on the bake looked fine.

Jarvgrimr

Haftoof said:

xnormal - Ignore per vertex color... I had this turned off for the polypaint diffuse once I turned it back on the bake looked fine.

AH! Dude, I had been having trouble with my AO bakes, I couldn't work out why. I had unticked that box to bake the vertex colours and forgot that it affects AO. Thanks for the reminder