Baked AO map is very dark

CrazyBuch

Why is the AO map so dark? For example 3ds max with mental ray bakes AO map much lighter. Marmoset 3.03.
Visual comparison:

CrazyBuch

Baker settings:

DRoss3d

Try turning off the Two-Sided occlusion. Also your ray count is really high. I usually bake with the ray count anywhere between 128-256. Higher values will take longer to render and you won't notice much difference after around 256 or so.

CrazyBuch

Thanks for your answer! With uncheck two-sided option almost nothing has changed, still dark. 256 ray count? how? I nave many various noise with 256 ray count, and still have some noise with around 1000 rays.

EarthQuake

Yeah for this sort of AO higher rays will generally help.

As to your original question, Substance Painter limits the distance rays of the AO to produce a more white map, this results in a less accurate AO bake, more like a dirt map than an AO map, but may be useful for certain types of masks. This is something that you can not do in Toolbag currently, but it is possible that we could add it in the future.

I'm not familar with Mental Ray, but I expect there is some sort of ray angle or distance setting that can be used to adjust the look of the AO as well.