Baked AO map appears to be to dark

Battery

Hi,

Having a bit of a problem with my AO map. When baked out it appears its way to dark in some areas and im losing a lot of the detail from the high poly version because of it.

At the moment im baking it out via batch bake (mental ray) attaching a lambert to the low poly model, setting colour to white and diffuse to 1 and applying my normal map to bump.

I am just wondering what I can do to brighten up some of the dark areas so the detail can show through a lot better. Tried transfer maps and xnormal and they give me bad results, so not really an option either.

Cheers, screenie attached of AO map

EarthQuake

This is in general not a very goo AO bake, with lots of directional lighting etc. What was wrong with the XN bake?

Battery

Thats what i dont understand, there are no lights in the scene, made sure of that.

As for XN, i got an error about ' Invalid function parameter 'msh' The mesh default has vertex UV indices but the count is not the same than the position vertex indices. please ensuren the mesh-> UVIndices.size() is ZERO or the same than the mesh-> PositionIndices.size()

EarthQuake

That is a UV error, what it generally means is the wrong UV channel is being exported. Be sure to delete any excess uv channels before exporting.

Battery

Thanks for solving that

I deleted all uv sets apart from map1 which only has my uv's on, exported again and the error is still popping up ?

EarthQuake

it could also mean that parts of your mesh contain no uvs, and it could be a UV error on the highpoly as well, delete all uvs on your high

Battery

Thanks for your help EQ, I seem to of found the problem poly :thumbup:

mortalhuman

That isn't the image the render window shows, is it? The image the render window shows will always be wrong, it's not your actual baked map but a complete map instead. If it's the render window image, go look to where you outputted your actual maps to. Seems you found the issue already, but just in case.