Ambient Occlusion - Opacity Mapped polys?

Ryno

Hey all, I've been doing a lot of ambient occlusion lightmap baking lately, and dread the times when the object is using some opacity mapped textures. The ambient occlusion needs to properly read the alpha/opacity in the texture, and cast shadows appropriately. What I have been using is a Skylight with Cast Shadows turned on, the samples increased to 28 or so for better accuracy, and no advanced lighting solution active. This works fine, but render times are horribly long (1-3 hours, depending on complexity).

Does anyone have a faster rendering solution for this? LightTracer will not read opacity, neither will Radiosity, and I couldn't figure it out how to do it properly with Mental Ray and get it to bake out. If anyone has some quick tips to get it rendering and baking to a UV set faster than the Skylight/shadows trick, please share. Thanks.

arshlevon

mental ray takes into account opacity but i don't konw how much better you render times will be. rendering opacity in general takes awhile. i found this out when i had to render a sequence with alphaed hair for a cinematic. when i hid the hair the render times went from 15 mins a FRAME to 1 min and 20 secondes. but i use mental ray a lot and find it faster overall if you know what your doing with the settings. all the options tend to turn people off when first using it. actually max 9 has some really good documentation on mental ray. but yeah opacity for some reason will really add to the render times.
anyway you could render the maps without the opacity parts? or do you need the shadows the holes make? if its 1-3 hours it might actually be faster to paint them by hand! ahahaha