Can't create Ambient Occlusion map

SimonScribbles

Hi guys, sorry for what seems like a silly question. But for some reason I cannot for the life of me seem to render anything. Trying currently to create an ambient occlusion map to use, but when I create a shader for it, all that appears is black. I have tried multiple different techniques, created new objects to test on that and nothing seems to work.





I have absolutely no idea why no matter what file i use it just shows black. If anyone can help me i would be most grateful.

Burpee

Why don't you just do it inside of xNormal ? it's free, easier to use and faster !

throttlekitty

Much faster!

That said, check your render settings that you have ambient occlusion enabled, under the "legacy options" header down at the bottom.

SimonScribbles

I tried both of these and only got some minor success with xNormal, as I managed to get xNormal to work the first time i used it, it produced this which i have no idea why it did.

I doubled check and there was no overlapping textures as you can see in the UV map here of it.


Eventually it made a map but there wasn't really alot of darkness to it. But the main frustration was now it appeared in maya like this


so random parts of it were invisible, even though all the normals were facing the correct way, feel like i'm losing my god damn mind.

Also I had a look in my render settings and saw that ambient Occlusion wasn't ticked, so i activated it and tried again. To no avail at all. just the same blackness.



I looked into whether it was rendering anything at all by putting another object behind, that renders but the surface shader i use for the ambient occlusion is still just pure black. No idea why this is happening, when every video i see about it works perfectly... just not on my pc.

wannabe

Hey, it's been a while since i've used Maya but i've baked quite a few AOs in there. This is pretty much the way i've used back then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0o6v0BUKgo

That said, i've had some long waits to get decent bakes out of it. Might be because i didn't know any better but Xnormal seems to be way faster.

throttlekitty

@SimonScribbles From what I see here, you're doing everything right. Shader is correct/applied and AO is ticked in your render settings, that's all you should need to do from a default scene. Getting that sort of noise in an AO bake I've seen in Maya before (transforms related), but not xNormal, but it's been a while. I'd say it's an issue with your geometry, or possibly your scene, since another object simply rendered as black. Mind sharing your scene?