High to low ao bake maya 2009 pixel errors.
polycount sponsor
Okay so now I'm trying to bake the high res ao down to the low res. Everything is working fine except I am getting these one pixel white and black dots all over the model. I've tried upping the rays and the resolution of the texture but it doesn't fix the problem. It almost seems like the transfer maps doesn't like the models slightly clipping into each other. I've tried setting all the relevant visability tags on the low res mesh just in case but no luck. Sorry for the low res bake in the screenshot but this stuff is painfully slow to troubleshoot and rebake.
Replies
(Btw Malcolm, I see you posting tons of questions about Maya lately, but into your portfolio I see great environment modeling, were you using Max before?)
That made me laugh out loud real hard.
Yes. Use Xnormals. It works too well not to use it!
this http://donaldphan.com/tutorials/xnormal/xnormal_occ.html is helpful for setting it up too, bit out of date, but the majority is good stuff
One thing to note with XN, if you have any hard edges on your mesh from maya, make sure you set "smooth normals" to "Average normals"(or smooth all edges in maya before exporting obj). This will ensure XN is using the same averaged projection for ao, otherwise you will get stuff that doesn't line up correctly and seams/missed detail on edges.
From what i've been told you cant bake high->low in maya, you have to uv your high, bake AO onto the high, then use transfer maps to transfer that texture as a diffuse map..... I'm surprised you managed to get it to work as well as you have in your shot!
[edit] oh also, pop into task manager, right click on xnormal in the processes list and do set priortiy -> below normal, or else your AO rendering may cause your entire system to run pretty slow(then you can do other work while its baking etc)
Not sure if this is sarcasm or what? Usually i dont care for the "Just use max lol!" type responses but in this case it is actually helpful/a real solution.
Hmm just for clarification : that's incorrect, Maya can bake high to low without UVs on the high, there is a render-to-texture equivalent in there. The interface itself is actually pretty nice. Still a pain to use anyways hehe.
There is something possible to : baking AO on the high at the vertex level, then baking that. Still nothing as good as XnNormal anyways.
The functionality/UI is there of course, but actually being able to *do it* is another story, as seen by malcom's first example and numerous other posts on same subject. I would LOVE to know how to do it correctly, and by that i mean without any errors from the high/low intersecting or whatever it is that causes all these artifacts. Everyone who i've talked to who knows anything about maya pretty much tells me there is no way to simply bake AO high to low in maya without extra tools(turtle etc).
This actually looks like a pretty good AO bake to me and exactly what you should expect to see from plain ao.... I think we've had this issue before, but you're doing the broken pillar eat3d tutorial yes? The example "AO" in that tutorial isnt a simple AO bake, but something more complex, i think he uses a ground/ceiling plane or something like that.... We had a thread about this a while ago and i think that was the conclusion, a guy was having similar problems because he couldn't reproduce that example, but in reality no app will give you that result without doing something extra.