High poly renders problem

Tim1

Hi,

I've been looking at good techniques for high poly renders and came across this thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60887 I've managed to recreate the shader by nrek where he's combined the mental ray AO map and shellac shader as shown here



My problem is that the AO pass that is rendering with it, is rendering the back faces of the floaters. I've tried disabling cast shadows in the advance lighting settings of the floaters and some other settings but to no avail.


Any ideas?

cookedpeanut

Well AO isn't really affected by shadow settings since the two are done differently in most programs. If you're doing a high-poly render then you'll have to either model the detail into the surface or unwrap and bake down the geometry to a normal map and apply it to the surface. No other way I know of to do this.

Eric Chadwick

Some info here, depends on your renderer. What software are you using?
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Ambient_occlusion_map#3ds_Max_Baking_Methods

Tim1

I've had a look at that but couldn't really see what anything that would help apart the Max distance setting but I've changed that and didn't really see any difference.

I'm rendering using mental in 3ds max and my material setup is this: http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9279/materialtutnrek.jpg

Tim1

Nvm, I've found the solution in an old thread in the forum, needed to apply a object ID to my floating geo and then set that number in the incl./excl. Object ID parameter of the ambient/reflective occlusion material.