Ambient Occlusion Confusion
Hey guys, long time lurker first time poster. And still rather new proper modeling methods. I'm going through a tutorial on Ambient Occlusion map creation through the transfer maps feature for a very simple brick wall I've followed the settings and instructions. But when I bake my map the image turns out almost completely blank. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any help would be very appreciated.
AO Map
Brick Wall Model
Transfer Map Settings
AO Map
Brick Wall Model
Transfer Map Settings
Replies
Try using Xnormal (freeware) instead. It's ten times faster and you shouldn't run into problems like this. If you do try it, change the ambient occlusion settings to something like this :
Rays : 256
Distribution : Cosine
Bias : 0.08
Spread Angle : 178
Limit Ray Distance : off
Allow 100% occlusion : on
It also issues with creating padding around UV shells which normally leads to seams, which is why you're having it calculate padding in the first place to help prevent the background from bleeding in.
By default Mental Ray takes longer to render normal maps and the default settings cause them to be more blurry than the standard rendering method. Only if you add more time to the rendering by turning on Final Gather can you get something that matches the standard rendering method...
So for baking maps mental ray is only really good at rendering AO but it has issues doing that. You're better off creating a ambient light set up like a light dome, applying a white material and rendering out a diffuse map that includes lighting. I prefer this method because you have more control over the lighting. Like you can bake in an overhead light or color the lights in a way that it will help you create your diffuse, like a gradient that blends from the top to the bottom of the character but because it's baked it lands on all the UV shells correctly regardless of their orientation.
For rendering scenes Mental Ray can produce some great results but with an endless supply of options to tweak its a nightmare for a lot of people, for rendering maps its just a nightmare. Xnormal is a great solution, but it is another app and I prefer to do all my rendering in 3dsmax and stay away from mental ray.
I love Maya's AO bake.
If your high-rez model ISN'T unwrapped, then run an automatic unwrap on the entire thing. Then bake the AO directly onto the High Rez using the Batch Bake (with decent MR setting, and a decently sized texture.
(This is gonna take a LONG ass time, so find a game to play or something).
From there you can just Xfermap the high to the low.
Anywyas, when I do a Max AO Bake, I just use a Skylight, and put in a ground plane. I generally prefer that over a MR bake.
Ewwwww. You "love" that workflow? Thats easily the worst AO baking workflow of any major 3d app. Well I guess we know why Autodesk hasn't implemented a standard high-low ao bake workflow in Maya, people "love" it this way. =P
Honestly, if you're baking in Maya, just do AO in XN.