3ds 2019 Max Ambient Occlusion

Chrismartinartist

Hi hoping someone can give me a better method for doing this.

I have 3ds Max 2019, so no Mental Ray, I want to use Render to Texture to bake the Ambient Occlusion maps for some fairly basic objects.

Currently my method is to use a skylight, shadows on, set to 16 rays. This takes a really long time but produces the correct result, a map which I then put onto my Diffuse texture in Photoshop.

Is there a way I can speed this up as it currently takes 2-4 hours per object, most are not complicated, just tables/chairs etc. The most complex they get is some have a separate element for cushions.

Thanks for your help

Eric Chadwick

Xnormal might float your boat.

Eric Chadwick

Or for a little bit of cash, you could use Knald which bakes super fast on GPU.
https://www.knaldtech.com/knald/

poopipe

Use Arnold utility nodes

Instead of fannying around with lighting

Chrismartinartist

How do you Render that out as a texture map?

I'm reluctant to use Arnold and shader trees as in the past I've not been able to export it in all the formats I need. I need to later be able to upload it to sites like sketchfab, cgtrader, turbosquid etc, as fbx and obj, many of them have issues with anything other than individual texture maps.

Eric Chadwick

Arnold works with Render To Texture.

Chrismartinartist

I'm getting this when trying to use Render to texture with arnold

Eric Chadwick

Is the renderer set to Arnold, and are you using an Arnold render element?

Chrismartinartist

Yes

Eric Chadwick

Maybe this
https://answers.arnoldrenderer.com/questions/7522/how-to-enable-render-to-texture-with-arnold-in-3ds.html

Chrismartinartist

Yes, this was it thank you!