Interior AO Maps?

Cthogua

Hey guys

I'm trying to bake out a global illumination/AO map (in Max9) for an interior environment and am not having much luck. Usually for AO maps I just go straight for the Skylight and lighttracer, but skylight doesn't get into interiors...So I tried the mental ray AO material and tried rendering a map out using that and didn't have much luck either. Anyone have any suggestions?

Joao Sapiro

pics ? interiors will always have near black oclusion since they are interiors, but i cant quite understand what you mean sorry

Xenobond

You should try messing with the max distance value.

Max distance—Sets the range within which geometry is probed. A value of 0.0 samples the entire scene. For non-zero values, only objects within this range are sampled. Default 0.0.

Eric Chadwick

Did you add interior lights? Or big windows and a sun? You need to use radiosity IIRC. If you just want the AO pass, set all materials to flat white (except the light sources).

JordanW

what was wrong with using mental ray AO material? too dark? too light? there are some settings you can tweak like maximum distance to cast a ray that'll help things from getting too dark.

Cthogua

Well I was under the impression that the mental ray AO material was geometry based and not light based. I was hoping to avoid placing a bunch of lights and endlessly tweaking them to try to get the AO/GI look. The problem I'm running into with the mental ray method is that all the interior spaces are coming out solid black. However it looks like tweaking the max distance is doing something, so I'll continue on that road for now. Thanks for the help!

Edit: Yup, that was it after some experimentation I bumped the Max distance in the "selected element unique settings" section of the Render to Texture dialog up to 100 and it worked great. Thanks for the help guys!

Psixos

I use e-light
to bake AO maps a la old school lightdome style, maybe inverting the lights after you set up the dome array would solve the interior problem.

Joshua Stubbles

Adjusting the max distance/spread settings will help a lot. That's what you change to make a crevice map as well. Should get your results you want.