maya 2009 transfer maps

Joao Sapiro

so im following this :

file:///C:/Program%20Files/Autodesk/Maya2009/docs/Maya2009/en_US/index.html?url=Renderer__High_Quality_Rendering.htm,topicNumber=d0e599538

and it seems in my maya there isnt a Lightning/shadowing , and no transfer maps too :S is this an isolate case or maya 2009 removed that tottaly?

rebb

Try the Drop-Down Menu where it says "Animation" - and switch it to "Rendering" .

Joao Sapiro

yeah worked thanks man, never thougth that would be default. thanks a bunch man !

Joao Sapiro

it worked, and i managed to bake a normal map correctly, the thing is im getting a weird artifactacion on the normal without no apparent reason , it looks good in high quality rendering, but if you zoom a tad you can see it , its like a tearing like if theres a dirty vertex or something ( wich there isnt ) , watch a small part below :



also, in some areas there appears signs of overlapping geo, but that isnt also happening , and it renders with this errors :



im also trying to get around ambient oclusion but honestly it seems hugely complex for something so simple :S maybe i am searching for the wrong thing ?

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/spotlight-articles/1317-tutorial-ambient-occlusion-maya-alchemist101.html

http://4sidedpolygon.com/blog/2008/04/24/maya-ambient-ocllusion-with-mental-ray-tutorial/


thanks for the help fellas !!

MoP

Baking ambient occlusion is slow and painful in Maya, avoid it if possible...

As for those bake issues, are you sure your normals are all ok? Try Normals -> Unlock Normals (you will need to change to the Polygon menu set in the same way you changed from Animation to Rendering as your first question was answered), if your mesh was imported into Maya then often it locks normals even if it shouldn't. Unlock them and make sure the smoothing looks correct in the viewport. If not, soften the offending edges.

As for the dodgy bake, maybe your ray casting distance is too high? Or maybe you've got some hidden geometry being rendered?

EarthQuake

Mop, what do you use to bake AO, if not maya? Dont you run into issues with stuff not lining up if your normals are from maya, but AO from xnormal?

_Aurel_

Just something OT here, but where did they put the option to add more geometry to Sub-D's in maya 2009 (when you first create it).

Joao Sapiro

thanks for the reply mop , it really helped


ok i fixed the dodgy bake by increasing the envelope distance and some other minor twekage, but the issue im running into is the artifacts really dont want to go , i tried everything, from normalizing normals, locking/unlocking normals , welding vertex incase there were dirty ones ( wich in max there werent, but could happen during export) i even exported a small section of the model, about 24 tris , to test in the problem area, and it still gives me the finger, i even tried to flip the uvs in some parts that were assigned as red in the uv editor, to no avail as well , this is driving me nuts, and i cant seem to find any reason to why these weird artifacts are happening :S

ivars

Could it be that you are only smoothing your highpoly using the smooth-preview (1,2,3 on the keyboard) instead of applying a smooth from the mesh menu?

The smooth-preview will not render, and that tear in the normalmap could be a hard edge in your proxy-mesh......

But it does look like a hard edge in your lowpoly. You should select the LP choose Normals > Unlock, and then Normals > Soften (in object mode it will set all edges to soft, or just select the edges you want to affect) Stay away from average normals :P
Also make sure all normals are facing the same direction, backface culling can be found in the shading menu of the panel window.

Don't know if it's possible, but if you could share some screenshots of the meshes and settings it would be much easier to help.

Joao Sapiro

ok , it worked softin all the edges man , so i already set the smoothing groups and worked, its strange it seems that maya corrupts every geo imported, i tried FBX , .Dae and .obj with diff settings and tweakage all gave me trouble, i had to rebuild smoothing groups from scratch etc...anyway good stuff thanks for the help man , now im trying to figure out amboc , if it is as painfull as mop says , i already have a sawed off by my side

ill be posting here if i come up with issues that by researching i cant get them fixed , thanks !

ivars

Just follow step 6 in this tutorial you posted: http://www.game-artist.net/forums/sp...hemist101.html

But as MoP said, it renders real slow and artifacts are common.

There are two other options in maya...

Using the AO render in Batch bake (Mental Ray) is fast and renders a nice result, but it doesn't transfer from high to low. But if you render it to a texture on your HP using Batch bake you can then transfer that to your LP using using it as a diffuse/color.

If your HP is really high res, like a sculpt, you can use the batch bake and render AO to the vertecies, and then using a custom mental ray shader in transfer maps you can render that to your LP. This renders pretty fast, but you might run out of memory when rendering the AO to the vertecies (depending on the vert count and the power of your machine of course)

MoP

EarthQuake wrote: »

Mop, what do you use to bake AO, if not maya? Dont you run into issues with stuff not lining up if your normals are from maya, but AO from xnormal?

I bake both using in-house tools.

BuCC

IMHO you should bake your ambocc in xnormals. It's faster and the results are better.

Joao Sapiro

thats my first thought, im doing that to see if the results line up hehe , i really want not to use maya amboc, because honestly iv never seen something as unpractical and unecessarily complicated before.

benclark

I should edit that tutorial I wrote and just say use Xnormal instead

I struggled through with Maya for a few years but once i started working to tight freelance deadlines I quickly switched to Xnormal.

Baking out large AO maps in Maya took me forever, and in my experience the quality of the bake was mediocre at best

Joao Sapiro

Yes for what i tested, its just too over complex, and the results are really bad , and lots of weird artifacts that appear randomly, beats me why it was never improved but xnormal amboc matches pretty well the normals i get on maya so i guess its good thanks alot for the help everyone !!