Maya Ambient Occulsion Issues

primnull

Using MentalRay baking to make my AO map
Working on a battle axe I made

So the thing is I can get only the front or rear to work.

• If I set camera to Surface Front, I get the blade to render but not the handle
• If I set camera to Surface Rear, I get the handle but not the blade
• FaceCamera gets just what I'm looking at and nothing else... so the camera view works good but the other side of the model is black. Think of Two Face from batman

I want the WHOLE model to get baked, not one side or the other.
Ideas to fix this? My settings at the moment, Maya 2012
http://i64.tinypic.com/2eyjfnm.jpg

thank you!

CharacterCarl

Hey,
not an expert on baking inside of Maya but it looks like the normals on the handle and the blade are facing in opposite directions which is what makes the baking behave differently for each of the two components. Make sure, you conform your normals and try baking again.

primnull

ok cool that did it thanks

primnull

a side note, do these black lines on the top of my knife look ok or should there be none at all? In MentalRay AO baker I maxed out the Fill Seams option which is supposed to fix them

attached

primnull

ideas?

CharacterCarl

Hey,
I couldn't tell exactly as I don't have your UV maps in front of me but do the edges with the black lines, by chance, not have their own UV islands?
When baking, hard edges always need to have their respective UV seams. Otherwise it will produce baking errors.
The lower border of the blade looks faceted. Think of where else you could remove hard edges or create UV seams/islands respectively. Bear in mind though that each island will need edge padding and more draw calls, so it is suggested to keep the number of islands low.

Check the wiki and Earthquake's threads:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Smoothing_Groups
http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts/p1

primnull

I did an automatic unwrap