Bake AO Bitmap in Max

xXCrimsonWolfXx

I would just like to know how to do this, I believe you enable the mental ray renderer right? 

Mark Dygert

Yep. Then in Render To Texture, there will be a new output type, I think it's called MR:AO or something similar.

Laurens Corijn goes over some of the different methods of baking AO.
http://www.laurenscorijn.com/articles/ambient-occlusion-baking

 Personally I lean toward VRay Dirt, if you have access to VRay. If I don't have VRay, then I would use scanline rendering with a custom light dome set up. There are a bunch of light dome scripts to help with that process.

I tend to avoid Mental Ray because it has a lot of issues outputting normal maps and jumping between render engines for different maps is a workflow nightmare. I pick one that works for all maps (usually Vray) and stick with it.

Eric Chadwick

We also have several resources here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Ambient_occlusion_map