AO in max using Mental Ray

solar

I've been searching for the solution someone posted here a while back for AO baking in MR but I cant find it, it was something to do with making the low poly non-renderable (i've tried a few settings but no luck) to prevent the black areas you get in the map where the low and high meshes intersect. Can anyone remember what it was?

skrubbles

You don't have to make your lowpoly non-renderable. Something simple that I do is before I'm about to render I go down on my lowpoly's modifier stack to Edit Poly, go into Element selection mode, select the entire mesh, and hide the faces. Then I go back up the stack to the projection cage. The lowpoly mesh should still be selected (even though you can't see it) and now you can render and it won't give you black areas in your map.

Sage

That's a nice tip Skrubbles, I'm wondering why it works however since when you used to hide geometry like that in previous version it used to render in the scanline renderer. It must be a Mental Ray thing.

Alex

solar

Thanks skrubbles that worked perfectly!