Doghouse Workflow to Quixel 2.0 (first time)

primnull

Ok so my uv skills have improved a lot and i have approx 1 tb of quixel 2.0 videos tutorials. My main focus is on ddo for the painter. I have a one main video I'll be using to guide me through basic exporting of maya mesh parts, assigning color map IDs, etc. I'll post a link when I find it again..

I thought I'd start with a simple model to get through the workflow
I made a dog house. High poly done and going to start watching beginner videos and see about assigning material IDs.

Here's my HP dog house,

primnull

ok well things are going ok. I have my low poly and am trying to generate my AO map in maya 2012
Half and sometimes parts of my model are pitch black and the other parts look fine
some questions if I could get some advice please...

I see 3 options in the BatchBake (MentalRay) baking options for the camera direction:
free camera
front
side

the tut I'm following says use free and that's great but with free I can only bake left or right side of the model, as the other side is not visible? And the other two modes I tried and do basically the same thing so not helpful. Is there a way to SHOW ALL of the model and get it baked? Feel like I'm missing something simple here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9b1vaG3qNE

I read up on black parts of AO bake and people say
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-940636.html

So I looked at my uvs and I have put a basic texture of checker pattern 1024x2 on it and it looks good no stretching and UVs are same size. In my texture editor my uvs are good and not overlapping and the big pieces I can put on top of each other I have with the Match UVs option in UV Deluxe, a very handy add on for Maya. I selected the model and went to Normals-Conform and did that. I started to read about the inverted normals vs inverted vertex normals
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?260557-Ambient-Occlusion-making-objects-black

Which seems pretty complicated. No idea what vertex normals are...

I also went into the UV texture editor and the Maya UV Deluxe editors to look for something that would align all UVs to a certain direction, as mentioned in the article. Can't find something like that
http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php?t-933157.html

And I do see the black lines on the edges of my model pop up. I saw that the fix is increasing one of the last options, Fill Texture Seams. It's set at 1 on default and I've cranked it up to 44 by going up and up and the lines on my edges are still there? Ideas? I want to avoid going into photoshop and correcting this by hand and probably ruining my bake...
[IMG]http://i65.tinypic.com/96jnus.jpg[/IMG]

Lastly, I am following the tutorial here for all of this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9b1vaG3qNE

and he doesn't have any of my problems which is totally weird.

In the mean time I see other tutorials to follow so I'll try those....